


For the Burden of Life Is Love

by horsecrazy



Series: The Originals [11]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 12:28:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 44,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4479284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horsecrazy/pseuds/horsecrazy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>11th entry in an ongoing AU Originals series Klaroline</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Do your eyes deceive you?
> 
> No, dear reader, they do not. This is an update under not just thirty thousand words, not just twenty, but fifteen. Please alert the press, and maybe take out a missing persons report, because clearly the girl formerly known as Jenn has either been body hijacked, or is currently gagged and bound in her closet while Julie Plec sets about fixing what this little plebian has done with her world. (Ok, so you'll find the latter pretty unlikely after you read this, but look into the body jacking thing.)
> 
> There is plenty more story to come (you had to know, of course, that I wouldn't just drop off this little ol' thing and call it good), but I wanted to end on the particular note with which this chapter closes and not cram anything else into it. With that being said, let's kick this off. This one-shot takes up almost immediately where the previous left off, say within half an hour or so of the tenth one-shot.
> 
> Also, the title of this is a line taken from Allen Ginsburg's poem 'Song'.

_For those of you just tuning in, we're reporting live from St. Louis' Cemetery, where reports of gunfire were called in just minutes ago. NOPD has deployed their SWAT team to negotiate what could be a potential hostage situation; as you can see behind me, officers are attempting to contact anyone who may still be inside the crypt from which those shots appear to have originated._

_So far, there has been no response._

_One witness says they did not see anyone leave the cemetery following those shots, which begs the question: what exactly_ is  _awaiting officers inside that crypt?_

* * *

_Before the break, we brought you up to speed on a SWAT team deployment at St. Louis' Cemetery- let's check in now with Dani to see if there are any new developments in this unfolding story._

_Hello, Tom!_

_Dani, do we have any updates? Are there any casualties- do we know exactly what happened? Gunshots in a crypt- that's a very unusual situation. We've seen a recent huge upsurge in violence throughout the French Quarter- could this be related?_

_Well, we don't have very many answers right now, Tom. SWAT officers have breached the crypt after receiving no reply or demands, and are now securing the scene. So far there are two- three victims, and no survivors. These bodies appear to have been_ mutilated _; we've been instructed to keep our crews at a distance while the investigation is ongoing, but a brief glimpse I got of the first body showed what looked to be large chunks of skin missing from the face and neck._

Mutilated _? By some kind of animal?_

_Well, that's what we're hoping to find out. It's a grim speculation, Tom, but it appears that perhaps those gunshots were unrelated, and what officers may have stumbled upon is the lair of a potential serial killer haunting New Orleans. We'll provide updates as soon as we can._

* * *

_This is Dani Germaine reporting live from St. Louis' Cemetery- officers have now retrieved_ six  _bodies, all of which appear to be similarly, and in a possibly ritualistic manner, mutilated about the face and throat. We spoke briefly with Officer Mike Seifer, who would provide no specifics, but did reveal that there appear to be more victims, and that this was a very recently committed act. You are urged to immediately report any suspicious activity within the vicinity of the cemetery; officers believe the perpetrator could not have gotten far._

* * *

 _We're back with Dani on-sight at St. Louis' Cemetery, with reports of_ more  _shots fired, is that right?_

 _That's right, Tom. Just minutes ago, we received reports that there might be a sole survivor, and seconds later there were several screams from inside the crypt, followed by shots from either law officers or perhaps what's_ not  _a survivor, but the murderer themselves- we just don't have any details, Tom. But wait a minute- here's a man approaching the scene, in plainclothes, but perhaps he's some kind of hostage negotiator-_

_Turn off your camera, love._

_Excuse me, sir, who are you? Can you tell us what's happening? Are you affiliated with the police department? Can you-_

* * *

His hands are trembling as he steps inside.

At his back the unblinking complacency of these men who have folded at his whim, and wait in ready silence, to his front the smog of a fresh shot, the stench of gunpowder, stench of death, drip drip of these fresh and mouth-watering veins, the faint mildew of old death, the bones baked in their southern kiln, the puddling of man's final moments-

He stumbles down a step.

Man and beast in their haphazard sprawls, and their lurid fates in Cadmium red over the walls, splashed to the ceiling, unrolled before him in glittering Hollywood salutation-

He stumbles down another step.

She stirs amongst the ruins of her mother.

He stops.

She looks up at him through her red curls, her red lashes, all of her soaked to the skin, mother in her hair, bowels on her hands, and oh love.

He takes a shuddering breath.

"You came," she whispers, as though he could have done anything else.

"Of course," he says softly, and she clutches her mother to her breast and what a  _noise_ the poor thing lets out, not unlike a boy who held his mother's heart and said to her of course he didn't mean it, mother, he was only lonely, he was only frightened, he would have just liked to know-

Still he was your son.

"I didn't mean to do this," she sobs. "Not…not to the cops. They were…they're like…her. But they were going…they were going to take her. Not yet, ok? Not yet, I just- I need to sit with her. Ok?" She smears away the snot and the tears and the blood with her sleeve and he watches something seismic ripple through her shoulders, down spine to waist, so that she must bend in helpless submission to it, and bring her forehead to her mother's gaping own. "What do I do when I let go of her?"

He starts forward, and she seizes her mother, she cradles the woman's half a face against her neck and she screams, "No,  _don't take her_ ," and down onto his heels he goes, into his most unthreatening crouch, to make himself small as a man, small as a twenty-seven-year-old boy with all his vast and pristine years before him, hands down, shoulders hunched.

He has his grave digger's croon, that he may sing song man into his bed of loam and maggots, and what does he know, siren of man, beast, child- what does he know, what has he to offer, herald of death, crier of plague, war, famine-

Caroline-

He wets his lips.

And she holds her mother, and if there is any loneliness- if there is any loneliness like that full and eternal circle of life, the womb for the child, the great and gaping absence of Mother, he has yet to plumb its depths.

He may not have deserved his grief.

But he stood holding her heart and seeing with his uncomprehending own her blank and lightless eyes, and he knows, sweetheart.

And oh, love, if he could fix it.

To turn back the clock, to spin the dial counter wise, and rewind the great and terrible film reel of Time, and for a while yet hold at bay this great and terrible truth all children must one day know-

"What can I do?" he whispers.

"I just don't want you to touch her. Just please don't take her from me," she says with a jerk of her shoulders, and a wipe of her nose.

"I won't. I won't, sweetheart. You can have as long as you need."

She strokes the red strands from her mother's eyes with her shaking fingers and she looks down with all the tenderness she must have stowed carefully away for so long, that it might not be seen, and turned round against her raw young heart.

She hiccups.

She lets her mother slither from breast to lap.

He takes a step forward, just a small thing, still in his crouch, his eyes on her face, waiting for her to bid him back, away, whatever she wants, whatever she requires, if he's just to stand here and be merely a set piece in this final tragic scene,  _anything_ , Caroline, if you- do you want him to-

Should it be anyone but him, playing at all these small human tendernesses with his thick and clumsy hands?

He stops.

Her shoulders twitch, another long and painful spasm makes its way from shoulders to spine, she hunches forward against all these indignities of grief, and begins to sob again.

And he just watching, love, and he's so  _sorry_ , that it's only him.

* * *

Mommy.

Are you watching?

And do you see all the ragged meat sacks that used to be people, and did you think with the last dying twitch of your last dying synapses, I raised a monster, she used to be a girl, she used to be my Caroline, and go to meet Daddy with tears in your eyes because we could have stopped her when she still had pigtails, and let her subside in long and permanent peace beneath the epitaph all daughters must earn one day, before they have outlived their mother's love?

Mommy.

All these years, and she's going to be so  _alone_ , she's going to be so  _lost_ , she knows you had to fight for it, but she had her  _mother_ , she had a  _home_ , she had  _someplace_ , and it was always going to  _be there_.

So she just sits here.

And you have long since cooled on her lap, and leaked your final struggles, and in place of that scent all children recognize, mom,  _mommy_ , your warm and willing neck, with that perfect cradle between shoulder and cheek for all disappointments- you're just… _blood_ and piss and the rank shit scent of all the victims who fell before, but she sits here anyway, mom.

Because what else does she do.

She has an out.

She has a switch all the children of all the world wish they could flip when into the ground go those stiff mummy leftovers of what brought them into this world and coaxed them through it and loved them not perhaps they way they needed, but still with all their clumsy human comprehension of what it is to break off a piece of yourself, and send it out into the world where it might be twisted beyond your feeble understanding.

So she has this out.

She can feel it in the back of her brain like an itch.

But she couldn't do that to you, Mom.

To just…wipe away everything you have meant and will always mean, and for her own personal comfort smooth the next weeks, months, years of her long and motherless life.

She couldn't do that.

So you see, you have one thing to be proud of.

So she sits here.

Because,  _God_ , once she  _lets go_ , Mom.

"Do you want me- should I get Stefan?" he asks quietly. "Or…Bekah?"

And she says no and she strokes her mother's hair and God it's so  _hard_ to get out, but please don't leave her, please don't  _leave_ her, that's all she can ask, everybody does it, she knows she's not pretty when she cries, her grief is an embarrassment, it's something to be tiptoed around, it takes up so much  _space_ you can't help but be made uncomfortable by it, shade your eyes against her glare, because look how her mascara has run, and her curls lost their bounce, is this your committee leader and your cheer captain with her eyes like holes and her heart all over her face-

And he's crept forward another inch, two, carefully so that he doesn't startle her, so that she's barely even noticed this advance, and he touches her arm, so gently, and he doesn't say it, but he'd put down roots here, waiting for her to be ready.

And she just-

She can't-

You don't know what it means.

He touches her cheek tentatively, he puts his fingers right through the blood and cosmetics and curls that stick to her skin like it's all just part of her, and he's never been very good at hugging, it's like his arms just aren't made for it, but he kneels in her mother's blood and he puts them around her like she's made of glass, or maybe he is, and all this snot she gets onto the collar of his probably bazillion dollar shirt, crying into his neck.

And it's like it's fine.

It's like she can just  _be_ a million, gajillion pieces.

He even pats her back a little, so clumsily it makes her cry even harder, because she never before had anyone try so hard, for just little ol' her.

* * *

She is waiting with a pile of Nik's paintings in flames at her feet when he walks through the door with Caroline at his side.

"Hello, Nik," she says, and smiles, so pretty, isn't she, big brother, with her hair perfectly combed, and her nails buffed to mirror, and all of her designer from boots to neckline.

And then she lifts the pistol in her lap and fires two rounds into Nik's head, and before he has sagged temporarily vanquished to the floor, she grabs him by the shoulders, heaves him twice into the wall, all these little slivers of him flying off into the house, his nose smearing, his teeth fracturing, his bones in a clockwork grinding that you will never know what white-hot satisfaction it lights in her belly and swells in her throat, Nik, because how often are you her prey, to be left cringing on your knees like  _nothing_ , like it is you whom must grovel for whatever forgiveness there is left in this family, how do you  _like it_ , Nik, do you imagine it feels anything like what poor Kol must have experienced, hoping for something better from his own flesh and blood,  _talk to her_ ,  _tell her_ , you  _git_ , what he suffered in his final moments and how he pleaded for the brother he lost so very long ago and if it  _hurt_ and if he wanted to know why wasn't she  _there_ -

He lands on his side, and she flips him with a kick to the ribs onto his back, and she fires again, into his face, so that she can watch all his features just disintegrate, and if only they could erase you so easily, Nik.

"What the  _hell_ , Rebekah?" Caroline spits out when she has at last unfrozen her voice, and she keeps her back to the girl as she pats Nik down and roughly jerks the white oak stake from his jacket.

"He killed Kol."

It snags, this accusation, but then when has her family not been a thing to hang up in her throat?

"What?" Caroline replies in such a small voice.

"Are you deaf?" she snaps. "I said he killed Kol. It was bound to happen sooner or later, with my brother running rampant through the city. It's what always happens when you don't fall in line with Nik,"

It's such a slap to the girl, she sees when she turns round.

Poor thing.

It's what you get when you believe in Nik, is all.

She tilts her head, and narrows her eyes at the girl's red chin, and her soaked throat, and the hands brown to the forearm with death just recently dried. "Where's all the blood from? Did he do something to you?"

"No," Caroline whispers, standing with her hands limply by either side, and her throat working over some obstruction must be nearly as large as the one in her own. "My mom's dead," she says, and begins to sob.

Nik stirs.

She lifts her pistol once more, and she blasts his pretty blonde curls all over the floor.

* * *

"And take these.  _Save_ them by any means," she snaps at the girl who steps away from Caroline's bath with that bovine complacency of the compelled, and thrusts first Caroline's blouse and then her trousers into the woman's arms. "Those jeans are Dolce and Gabbana. Do you understand what that means?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I don't think you do. I had to compel myself past a whole waiting list of people to get them. So get those blood stains out, or the next ones on them will be yours."

"Yes, ma'am."

" _Miss_ ," she snaps. "Do I look like I'm middle-aged and wearing control-top hose?"

"No, miss."

"Now get out," she says, and pushing the woman out, she slams the door.

Caroline is sitting on the edge of the tub with the curls lank and rusty down her back, still in her bra and panties, and the goosebumps like some kind of horrid breakout on her back.

"Come on; off with the rest," she tells the girl, and crosses her arms.

But a mother's death stuffs up the ears to all else, and so she just sits there, staring down into the fumes of lavender and rose, shoulders slumped.

"Caroline."

Somewhere in the house the girl has set to work at those stains, and that long-suffering grandfather clock with the crack down the middle where once Kol put Nik's head through it opens its throat to cry the hour, and outside where the world moves on as it always does, without a mother, without a brother, the cars hiss away at their commute and the revelers cheer whatever vulgar new justification for alcoholism has brewed itself anew in their tiny minds, and she touches the girl's back, with just the tips of her fingers, and oh, Mother.

If you only knew what cracks you put in a daughter's heart.

You'd never leave.

"I killed Tyler," she sniffles. "But at least she didn't see that. So she got to- she got to…keep some of it. Like…what I used to be. You know?" she asks, and takes a great pull at the air, like she's just broken the surface. "Back when I was just her little girl. And she didn't have to try to love me."

She gave into her urges so quickly, when Mother unbent their bones from man's mortal anchor, and sent them wild into the world with no more clocks in their hearts.

How could any mother look upon her daughter like such, she used to think, picking the bones from her teeth, didn't you guide her first steps, and salve her first love, Mother, wasn't it always going to be- couldn't she never do something  _bad enough_ , doesn't a mother's love stretch and stretch, and eclipse all sins, and gather them still unto its breast, and rock them like a child?

She loops her arm round Caroline's shoulders, and rests her chin on her head.

She was once a daughter, and she knows.

"I'm sorry," Caroline hiccups.

"For what?" she asks, and shuts her eyes. "Don't be a twit, Caroline." She takes a deep breath. "You're a girl. We don't scrape and bow and make our apologies for taking up space in this world, with all our bloody feelings."

Those thin pimpled shoulders heave, and the girl leans forward to rest her face in her hands, and she keeps hold of her lightly but bends forward with her, and it's all right, if she leaks a few of her own tears into Caroline's hair, and feels in her heart Kol's death like it's the first grief she's ever known.

Maybe she'll take the girl, and just leave.

Maybe she was always sniffing round for her love in the wrong places, trusting to lovers and brothers her frail and hopeful heart.

She hears Nik mount the first step.

Her heart leaps, the sweat prickles along her lip, there's the thundering of the blood in her ears, wrists, throat, metal adrenaline, liquid knees, but she keeps hold of the girl, she pops open her eyes, she tilts her head so it's her chin and not her cheek once more on Caroline's head, and listens to the creaking of the second step, the moan of the third, silent fourth, whispering fifth, and Nik, when did you become something she had to shore her courage against, and stiffen her spine like so, that she might take any blow, and pop up swinging?

She never asked for you to be perfect, Nik.

Only a brother and not an executioner.

She can hear him breathing outside the door.

She wipes her eyes and presses her lips together.

Do it, you bastard.

Kick the door down, drag her screaming by her hair into the corridor, up the next flight, dash her against a wall here and there, threaten her pretty hair, her prettier face, put your nose to hers, and roar out your  _where is it_ , jostle her till her bones rattle like dice, remind her she has one living brother who is not yourself, who cares if she spends her next century not rotting underneath but breathing up above-

What else has she to expect from you, Nik?

She wipes her eyes again.

She wants to taste the innocence of this girl once more, and look up into Nik's eyes, and think to herself, he wouldn't, not his own brother, his love hasn't rotted in his dark and shriveled heart, he's only hidden it away, because people poked it where it was softest, and laughed when he cried.

But she's slept for so long, with the dust drying on her lids, waiting for her fantasies of errant brother knight on his white and shining horse to sprout legs, and walk themselves into her tomb.

She tightens the arm round Caroline and she sets her jaw, and do not be afraid, daughter, her mother might have told her.

He is only a boy.

Mother said once, with the virginity still sticky on her thighs, don't cry, Bekah darling, it's what he wants of you.

And she stepped out into the world and understood, so it is with most man, who rides his beasts not so unkindly as his wives, and so mother, mother, why do you cry, when she no longer takes her revenge with bruised thighs and broken lips, when at first sign of his intentions, she spits him on her teeth, and wipes away his death as casually as he'd have surely smudged away her maiden's blood?

There's a rattle in Nik's throat.

She could rip it right out of his throat.

She did that with her first and only victimizer, and flicked it from the tip of Kol's dagger into the bushes while he spurted like no wound she'd ever before seen, and scrabbled about in the leaves, and gurgled into the grass at her feet what surely must have been the only plea of this man's short and brutal life.

And poor Kol, fourteen and all angles, vomiting into the undergrowth.

Men just don't endure, she remembers Mother telling her.

And so, Bekah, forgive them for taking what they will never deserve; it is their only talent, dear daughter.

But she's tired of being you, Mother.

With her fine white neck bent beneath the boot of the strongest of all the Mikaelsons, and muffling her tears because oh, he doesn't know any better, he'll come round if only she loves him well enough, long enough, with all her servile woman's heart meant for nothing greater.

"Come in, Nik, I dare you," she says, still holding Caroline.

He never could resist a challenge, her big brother.

But he merely stands in the corridor, listening to them breathe, and perhaps smelling all this salt, but when have tears been a thing to stir and not delight her brother, when has he stood not making a sound, just living from one ragged breath to the next, not blustering out his next threat, but respecting how heavy are some silences, and sounding almost nervous, when he breaks it at last-

"Caroline's mother is safely at the morgue. For whenever she decides what's to be done with her. The rest of it's been cleaned up as well. So." She hears him shift his weight, take a breath, run one hand over his lightly stubbled jaw. "I didn't kill him, Rebekah. He left. And I didn't go after him."

Her lips give a warning twitch, and she squeezes her eyes tightly shut for a moment.

"He ran away, just like all of us have tried or longed to do at some point," she tells him coldly. "Because you showed him once again that if he can't love you and only you, Nik, he shouldn't bother."

There is a long pause.

"He didn't leave alone," Nik replies quietly. "I let them both go."

Caroline takes a deep breath in her arms.

She blinks and smudges away half her tears, half her mascara, lets the rest fall where they may, brings her other arm up round Caroline.

"Caroline," he says, and then he just stops.

He whisks on away up the stairs.

* * *

She leaves Caroline sleeping in her bed, curls wet and tangled underneath her, and steps into the kitchen for a snack from the maid's neck.

The girl's only scrubbed half the blood stains from Caroline's jeans, and so she drinks till the girl's gone colorless with it and leaves her for another of the staff to clean up, patting her mouth daintily with one of the paper towels from the dispenser, carefully so she doesn't muss her lip gloss, and then back up to her room where Caroline sleeps away her grief, and she's not been gone fifteen minutes, but here Nik lies, not touching the girl but curled up at her back with his hands respectfully underneath his armpits, like he understands precisely what he's good for, a bit of warmth as from a hearth glow, but no real comfort to any burdened heart.

She stands just back from the doorway, slowing her heartbeat, slowing her breath, so that next to the girl as he is, breathing the scent of her fresh hair and her damp skin and listening to the thumping of all her fragile young life throughout her veins she is nearly invisible.

He falls asleep like that.

He's very young when he sleeps, Nik.

With the curls just lying on his forehead, and the dark eyelashes soft on his cheek.

He doesn't deserve it, but she pulls the sheet lightly over them both anyway, settling it carefully on his shoulders so he doesn't stir, doesn't wake, doesn't look up and see that his sister has tried and struggles still, but she's soft, she's not filled herself to the brim with hate, Nik, and let it fuel her every whim, she just loves, and she can't help it.

You could have stopped punishing her for it.

You could have made it so she's not sick with her own love, lying here with her face pressed to your hair.

* * *

She wakes up, and she has no mom.

That's the first thing she remembers.

And she doesn't like that, she doesn't know how to process it, how do you open your eyes on a day and understand it's  _that_ day, it came too soon, you never had the  _time_ , you were supposed to get so much  _more_ , you were going to  _adjust_ , it was always going to be this gradual tiptoe to the end.

You're nineteen.

You're supposed to have a mother.

So she stares at the ceiling for a while, with the tears standing on her bottom lids.

And then she just…slides back underneath.

* * *

For two days, she does this.

And don't tell her, chin up, Caroline Forbes, it's only death, it's only human, and like all things this too shall pass.

She knows that.

But she has forever.

She has  _forever_.

And this one thing- this  _one thing_ -

She couldn't have longer? She couldn't have just another decade, two, three, to get some time beneath her belt, to get some perspective beneath her belt, to establish her two feet on the solid ground beyond her teens, beyond her untidy and seismic adolescence, where she understands nothing, where she is only a child, where she has just barely begun to grasp, death, it comes for everyone, even for mothers, but not for the girl with her shiny blonde curls and her pretty cream cheeks.

Mom.

Oh  _God_ , mommy.

It hurts so much.

You would have made it better.

You would have told her, here's how you go on, without me, without Daddy, here's how you square your shoulders and face the world without an anchor, without a back-up, here's how you just  _do it_ , and you live.

But, oh, you're not here- you're not here, and so she doesn't know-

Where does she start?

* * *

He brings her blood bags he leaves at the foot of the bed.

Sometimes she hears him, moving around the house, but mostly he's silent, mostly he's hovering at the edges of his own home, mostly he's just  _gone_ , but she comes out of the bathroom one day, and she catches him laying out her favorite candies and teas next to the bags.

He freezes.

"Hi," she says.

He laces his hands behind his back and rocks awkwardly on his heels. "Hello." He darts his tongue out to nervously wet his lips. "Are you- have you-"

"I'll do both parts for you. Are you ok? No, stupid, my mother just died. I know, I'm sorry, I just- it's what you say. I know. Thanks for caring enough to do the awkward oh-God-this-person-has-been-crying-so-much-what-do-I-do dance."

God, she wishes you would smile like that more.

Without the malevolence, without the swagger, just the dimples, just the little crinkles at the corner of your eyes, and the little duck of your head, like you're just a boy, you don't know any better than she where to go from here, with which foot do you make your first stride, how do you carry on, when will the world embrace you?

"I brought you a few things."

"I know. I'm just sad, Klaus, not blind."

"Right." He clears his throat awkwardly and looks down at his feet. "Where's my lovely sister? Out sharpening the stake she still hasn't given back to me?"

"Out getting me more clothes, probably. Apparently, you designer shop your way back to a glad heart."

"Ah, yes, retail therapy. Bekah's quite adept at it."

They try to smile at one another, but hers is broken right now, and he sees it, and he falters.

She listens to the clock downstairs ticking away, and the thump of his heart in his chest, too fast for a man who has ridden down Russian generals, and French lieutenants, and yawned his way through their deaths like all other deaths.

"Caroline. Can I- bring you something?" he asks so earnestly, and then downstairs the front door slams, and Rebekah appears half a second later, shopping bags in hand.

She tosses them onto the bed, and lifts her chin to Klaus. "Get out."

"It's ok," she says quietly. "He's trying."

"Well, isn't that lovely," Rebekah snaps, and slams the door in his face.

* * *

One night she just walks out of the house, with Klaus gone and Rebekah sleeping.

It's a kind of sleepwalker's daze.

You'd probably cry to see her, Mom, shuffling along with her hair down like a woman's, and her lipstick red as blood.

But she's been thinking.

She likes the spurt of the fresh vein in her mouth, she likes all the little struggles of her prey, the thrashing arms, the kicking feet, the last mercy cry of the throat, incomprehensible with blood and bile.

She can't tell you she doesn't.

She dressed it up in ribbons, because she wanted you to like her.

She's had to do that a lot, you know.

A girl is only human, but not her, not Caroline Marie Forbes, who had to be better, who had to be seamless, who was supposed to overshoot the mark, and always fell just a bit shy.

But anyway, you know how it is, with the bed not quite right around you, the pillows too cool, the sheets too hot, sleep always just beyond the fingers, and all the day whirling around your heart, and coming back up your throat.

Like she said: she's been thinking.

And she wants to know, why hold herself back, why  _pretend_ , why keep looking  _down_ , and pretending to herself Klaus is a monster, Rebekah is a monster, the whole nutso family is just fundamentally  _different_.

So she thought why not wear her skirt a bit too short, and her lipstick a little too bright, and shut her eyes for a moment and let Caroline the Girl mourn the days when there was a mother, there was a daughter, and if neither of them were perfect, they were not monsters, they were not the slayers of monsters, they performed that dance of all those taut teenaged years, autonomy vs. umbilical cord, and Mom was always going to lose, and divide her time between her weeping and her pride, but they would have parted smiling.

We like to tell ourselves because we don't accept something it is not a truth, though it hides behind our heart, and we feel it worrying away at our ribs.

And that's what she's been trying to do, Mom.

But you're not here, you're  _not here_ , and she can't face a trillion gajillion more years, creeping around what she is.

So you have to forgive her.

You have to forgive her, for all those times she tried, and this one time she didn't.

You think it's going to be something cinematic.

The slow loom from the shadows, and the moon just perfect behind you, the slight breeze in your curls, the streetlights caught on your lips, the condescension of this six-foot behemoth with the shoulders like mountains (well hello there girly), and the smile, and the head tip.

The one heel just slightly ahead of the other.

And knowing in your heart  _this_ man will never pin me,  _this_ man will never bruise my hips, and drink my screams,  _this_ man will think to himself, no it's me who needs to flee, and turn to run, and spoiler alert-

He won't make it.

The streetlight shorts out at just the right moment, and it's like the clouds  _know_ , and close their arms around the moon, and  _God_ , she feels this all the way to the tips of her toes, the man's warm fear, his fluttery pulse, the first stuttering steps on the pavement, and she closes her eyes and she inhales that one slutty intake of breath, you know the one she's talking about, the one right on that verge, just at the edge, and she pops open her eyes, and maybe she means it and maybe she doesn't, she's not sure yet, but she smiles.

She doesn't walk quickly.

It's scarier that way, she remembers, tearing along with the breath sour in your lungs, and the rubber in your knees, and the footsteps never getting farther away, just freaking moseying along, like they've got all the time in the world.

Once there was a girl, and she was just like you.

And she rattled the doors of shops long-asleep, and she opened her lungs to the world, and she begged it,  _please_ , somebody  _help_.

And she thought it was just a story.

Just for a moment.

Because girls don't really die when they're seventeen, they don't really leave their mothers alone in houses their daddies abandoned long ago, their hearts don't just give up, and stop going, not when they're seventeen.

But sometimes they do.

And sometimes you stumble across one of these girls who stopped breathing at seventeen, and you think, just look at her, she's nothing, and though you caved to your first prey's instinct to run when the moon filled her hair, and the streetlight failed just right, and the clouds converged just so, that a mind full of midnight and alcohol might think, her eyes are black, she's got death in her smile, you stutter out of that sprint you tore off in, and you smooth the sob in your throat, because seriously, come.  _On_.

You think it's going to be something cinematic.

And it is.

He turns to you like any stupid victim in any B horror, because humans never change, they always think to themselves not here, not now, not  _me_.

And your smile is just like you always dreamed.

And the scream he is too scared to sound goes straight to your belly, straight to all the places you are not supposed to feel death, and you think, you could fuck him, right here, right now, with your hand over his mouth.

But you're not that kind of girl.

You just eat him, is all.

And he's so warm, it's just  _fantastic_ , sliding down your tongue, down your throat, it's what you always imagined, sitting there with that bag between your lips, you feel it sizzling in your veins, burning up your cheeks, and the way he  _fights_ it, and how easily you twist his arm behind his back, and you hold him right where he is, with the head yanked back, and the throat pumping into the night, and you are not a monster, you told Daddy, you are not a _monster_ , you're a  _daughter_.

But you know just precisely how to bury your face.

And if you collapse when he does, and kneel there with your face in your hands, sobbing into your palms, and any nearby heart surely bleeding because the poor thing, she must have lost so much, to wail like that, still your veins are hot, your face is smeared, you look him in the pale and lifeless face and you don't think Mommy, you don't think, I'm sorry, you don't think who does he leave behind, what have I  _taken_ , you wish there was more, you wish he hadn't gone so  _fast_.

* * *

It's not that he doesn't care, she understands.

It's just-

It's not what he knows.

He's never healed someone of death, he's never thought, some puny mortal has died, and I the Great Klaus ought to fix it, somewhere within me are the words and the experience and the capacity to Make It Better, so for once what I touch will not turn to blood, will not turn to screams, for once I will open my arms, and there will be someone to walk into them, not to their death, not to their salvation, that's in someone's own breast, and not another's embrace, but just into me, where for a little while I will be enough.

But he steals in to leave his gifts silently.

What would he know about mourning a mother anyway, Rebekah asks in disgust, but she doesn't take them away.

Sometimes they just lie there on that bed with their heads touching, and Rebekah pretends she's asleep, like it's only an accident, like it's only unconsciousness that leans them against one another like that, because of course she needs no one, of course she stands alone in her designer boots and her trillion-dollar jeans.

Sometimes when she really is asleep, Caroline slips a hand into her twitching palm, and holds it until she stops crying, too quietly to wake her, because that's how girls are trained, that's what she was always told, grieve however you need, just as long as it doesn't step on any toes not your own.

And that's when he comes, to stand outside the door, and listen to them breathing, and to hesitate there like he just needs a moment, he'll just take a breath, and then he'll slip himself right inside, and to his sister he'll say I was wrong, and to her he'll say, love, I'm so sorry, and it won't make it all ok, but at least it'll be  _something_ , at least they won't be in here and he won't be out there, where nobody ever solved anything.

But he never comes in.

And Rebekah just goes on breathing, and she just goes on crying.

* * *

"What was it like, after your mom died?" she asks one night when Rebekah pretends to sleep but does not.

She's a while answering, just lying in the moonlight and breathing her slow and false slumber.

Sometimes in moments like this, she puts out her hand and she touches the hair next to Rebekah's cheek because they both need it, and that's ok, and she wishes that's what time immemorial would impart.

"It was like everything ended," Rebekah says without opening her eyes. "Except me."

"And what about now?" she asks, her voice cracking.

But she knows.

You don't bury your mom with a thousand, thousand years.

So there are no pretty words.

But Rebekah opens her eyes and tucks one of her curls very gently behind her ear, almost like she's getting the hang of this whole friend thing, and if a friend is only something to leave you, and break your heart on the way out the door, still she thinks it's worth it, to enjoy them while they stay.

* * *

She hears him in his office, bossing minions and tacking away on the keys of his laptop and shutting the doors of her filing cabinets and here and there butting heads with Elijah.

Well, a story doesn't end because your favorite part is over.

So people commence their business of loving, and dying, and living, they do not stop moving outside her window, because her own small universe stopped spinning, and crashed into wherever it is children go when their mothers stop breathing.

But she doesn't have to watch the glare of them.

She waits until the house is quiet at night and slips out then, when there's nothing but black in the sky, and her heart in her ears.

Somewhere down Bourbon St. a lone radio crackles, and there are the ever-present boots, and the bored tick tick click of some soldier flicking his safety back and forth, back and forth, and as she walks she inhales them, she can't help it really, not when they sweat like so, and snag their cuticles on all those little hazardous protrusions of life, and squeeze out into the world all the mouth-watering lure of an eleven A.M. Cinnabon.

The moon's not here tonight.

And there's a wind, it tears at her hair, and whips out her coat, and she doesn't know if it's a herald, if it's an announcement, look out world, something wicked this way struts in its Jimmy Choos and its Armani trench-

But you can just imagine how she looks, here alone in the wind and the black and the streetlights ahead of her giving a shudder, not, she likes to think, at the mercy of those fickle whims of electricity and all its little kinks, no, here is a girl, here is a  _woman_ , she lost her mother, she killed a lover, quail before her, world, and bend your knee at her arrival.

She didn't come here to kill anyone.

She wants to put that out there.

But she finds a guy working late in some little shop on the corner, she didn't even look at the name, she just saw the light, and she broke the lock on the door, wrenching it open, and it was like he knew, just looking at her, this tiny blonde thing in his doorway, she's here for his heart, he can see it in her eyes, or hear it in her 'Hi', and when he tries to run, it sends this thrill down her spine, and she understands, this is what his smirk is about, this is what he sees, when he looks out over the world.

She snaps the guy's neck, and then she bends him at the throat like she'd crack a lobster, and she sticks her face into what pops free.

She hears the door open.

It's a small noise, an inconsequential noise, what is it to the snap of bone, and the wet slurp of the meat from its tendons, and the blood, pounding in her teeth, pounding in her chest, but she pulls her face away, somehow, someway, and she looks up.

And it's him.

His jacket is open over his Henley, those necklaces shining in the lamplight.

He nudges the door shut behind him with his heel.

The click is louder than her heart.

She lets the man slide out of her hands, but she doesn't wipe her face, she stands here before him with the veins black under her eyes and throat still caught in her teeth, she listens to his pulse like a drum in his neck, and the breath heavy in his nose.

"Well, love," he says softly, and he takes a step forward, a predatory thing, full of slinking muscles, and pupils dilated to Sex.

And whatever he came for, she could seize this, she could have him the way she didn't have that other boy, the way she didn't close her hand around his throat, and kiss him dead.

He takes another step forward and stops in the middle of the room, his head tilted like she is something particularly fascinating, his hands behind his back.

She could kick his legs out from underneath him, and he'd fold.

He'd even like it.

All thousand years of him groveling at her feet and the dead man at her back, and outside those streetlamps giving another nervous flicker, and the boots tromping past, tromping past, but never stopping and turning just to check, because a prey knows, it scents its fate, and tears away home, where there are no wild and moonless nights, and little blonde girls in grown-up shoes.

He doesn't take another step.

Maybe he can't.

Maybe he's afraid.

Maybe he is everything she spent the first seventeen years of her life being.

So she steps forward instead.

She leaves her fangs down and her veins out and he looks at her like-

Like there's nothing else.

Like she never has to be  _just_ Caroline Forbes again.

Like maybe her mom wouldn't get it, maybe poor Tyler- poor Tyler got in her way, and she wasn't good enough to spare him, like she tried and she tried and she  _tried_ and still it just came surging up out of her, because that's what time does, that's what immortality does, you can stay pink-cheeked, you can stay lithe, you can't stay seventeen.

And that's ok.

She smells the dead guy at her back and the cologne on his collar and the blood in both their veins, and she thinks maybe he should run.

She thinks there was never a feeling like this, in all her years, not when she drenched her chin with her first kill, not when he broke the skin of her neck with his brother smoldering at his feet, and she thought I might die, I might die, and I like it.

It hurts her throat.

It warms her heart.

It stretches itself all the way to the tips of her fingers and tingles there like lightning, she feels the arc of it in her knees, in her toes, she thinks to herself what does his jugular taste like, will his knees buckle when I rip him, what kind of noise will he make, when I shred the skin from his back and tear the curls from his nape-

She flashes her hand out to grab him by the throat.

His hands part.

His lashes flutter.

She kisses him just a little, not with teeth, not with tongue, just a slow slurp of his bottom lip, her thumb caressing his carotid pulse.

He's already half-hard against her.

She hears him swallow noisily, and ducks her head to kiss just underneath his adam's apple.

And then she just slams him back against the door, so hard she rattles the 'closed' sign against the window, pinning him with her hips.

He takes a ragged breath, and she squeezes harder, she yanks his head roughly to the side and she sinks her teeth into the arch where his neck slopes down into his shoulder and now she lets go of his throat and she jerks both of his arms over his head to hold him by the wrists as she feeds, and he could snap her fingers so easily, and throw her like a doll, but he doesn't, he wouldn't, he barely keeps his feet, he tips his head back against the door and breathes like a victim, all harsh and rattly in the back of his throat, the blood bubbling in his open wound, and God, she likes that,  _God_ she likes the way he tilts his hips forward into hers, so unconsciously, he can't be anything but just swept up in her-

She kicks his legs out from under him.

And it's just like she imagined, him kneeling on the floor before her, with his curls in her hand, and his shoulders heaving, and those lips still open and damp with her kiss, and she wonders what sort of hole her heel would put in his throat, if he could breathe around it, if he'd look up at her like she was the universe, and lick the blood from her feet.

She holds her wrist to his mouth, and he closes his lips around it without looking away from her eyes.

She sees the veins spread underneath his eyes first, and the lightening of the irises, and then the dimples.

When his fangs break the skin of her wrist, she comes.

* * *

But it's all just play, the grown-up shoes, the lipstick like blood, because when the mortician flourishes the sheet from her mother, she starts to cry.

"Go outside and wait until one of us tells you to come back in," she sniffles through her tears, and he nods and he flashes his blank smile and he shuffles away into the hall.

For a while, she just lets herself pour out everything that she dammed with blood, dammed with sweet human throats, dammed with the singing of a girl's new and aching heart when a boy kneels before her in the dark and stares up at her like she is the sun.

Her mother doesn't look like her mother.

Death is like that.

But, Mom, a mother is always supposed to be a mother.

So she pulls the sheet over this thing that is not your face, and she tucks it in around your stiff head, and she chooses instead to remember this lady who sometimes didn't get home when she said she would, who once baked a great towering pile of a chocolate cake, all black and shiny, and tasting of burned ass, who wasn't perfect, who was only a person, who loved her, whether either of them believed it or not.

And she dries her eyes.

Because one day you have to go on.

Because sometimes it doesn't look like it from your bed, through your tears, but there's still a story.

"Can you tell him to come back in?" she asks Klaus, very steadily, with her chin lifted.

"She wanted to be cremated," she says when he slips back inside. "That's all I know. She didn't- she didn't make up a will. So I don't know what she'd want done...afterward. What was important to her, you know? Where would she want to be put? She had me, and she had Mystic Falls. And I don't want to go back there. And I don't want her to go back there. We were both stuck. You just don't know it, when you get comfortable, when you get afraid."

She takes a deep breath. "So that leaves me. And sometimes there were times when I thought that disappointed her, that in the end it was just me and her, that she didn't have anything else. But I can't still be using that like a crutch when I'm a bazillion. I can't do something, because she'd approve. I can't not do something, because she'd disapprove. You can't live one lifetime like that, let alone eighty." The mortuary swims, she feels the thickness of her grief in her throat, in her chest, but it's supposed to take up room, it's supposed to feel like dying, or maybe being born, it's always going to be a beginning and an end.

"And I think she'll be sad, but she'll still love me. That's what moms are good at."

She turns away from her mom to face Klaus, and he swallows when she looks at him, the tendons shifting in his throat, and the heart rich and full in him, and the scent of it tingling in her veins.

"So have her taken over to the crematorium at St. John's Cemetery," she tells the mortician. "And then from there, she can go with me. And eventually I'll find a place, and I'll think, oh my God, mom would have just  _loved_ this, and that's where she'll get to stay. And by then I think I'll have made peace with that, that it's just going to be me, going on."

She doesn't look away from Klaus as the guy carefully loads her mom onto a gurney, and wheels her out into the hall.

"I'm not going to live according to some…regulations I think my dead mom probably would have set out for me. I could do that, for a few years. But I can't do it forever. And I can't feel like a failure, every time I slip."

She watches the tendons in his throat shift again, and when she thinks how pretty they'd look in her hand or how warm they'd feel in her gut, she doesn't suppress it, she doesn't tell herself you are a girl and not a monster, Caroline Forbes, she doesn't tell herself, put that down where it belongs, and conduct yourself like a freaking lady.

"I want you to teach me how to not be ashamed of it. How to get over what I am, and just… _live_."

She's not used to hearing his voice this soft. "That takes time, love. Not instruction."

She puts her hands in the pockets of her jacket, and takes a step closer, because he's always doing this, puncturing all these personal bubbles, and making of himself a thing that can't be ignored, and now it's her turn.

"Then just be there. So I know that no matter what I do, it's never gonna' be bad enough."

* * *

The first thing to remember with murder is to have fun and be yourself.

She doesn't know where she read that.

But it seems like a good jumping off point.

Klaus tells her it's not a person, it's just food, it's just the still warm corpse of a man who was going to lie down in his inevitable bed of mold and worm anyway.

He's always so freaking poetic-y about these things.

But it does help.

To think to herself, maybe life was going to knock him around so hard, and for all his troubles he was only to get a cold plot, a marble goodbye, and maybe there's not even a mother, to stand for years watering his only green and living remains with her tears, just the grass feasting on his old and rotten bones.

She likes to chase them.

It makes her think of that girl crying on her bed, and the afterward ache of wrenched hips and bruised thighs, and not even mourning her lonely victim's hours of sticky thighs, sticky throat, and moving on, but skipping around with her curls flying and her scarf waving, because isn't her shiny new boyfriend with the hot car and the hotter abs just  _fab_ ulous?

She couldn't hold down a gnat.

But this girl- this girl.

She likes to see what the darkness shakes free, and sends slobbering after her swaying hips, and her cute little smile.

One time, she spends like an hour watching one of the patrols, and picking out the tastiest among them.

You start learning how to smell them, the really ripe ones, with the blood that will go down so smooth, so sweet.

Here's where girl Caroline might have felt sick to her stomach.

She picks out the one that smells best, short, baby-faced, newer than the rest, cute and curly-haired and dimpled, a boy with a smile that makes a mother of everyone, and she waits for him to switch out with another soldier.

She follows him all the way back to his hotel, and into his room.

He sings in the shower.

He reads himself to sleep.

He lays all sprawled out over the covers, only the thin sheet over him, and the moonlight coming in through the open window, to stripe his young unbearded cheek.

She stands at the end of the bed, just studying him.

Sometimes she goes alone.

Sometimes she likes it best that way, just her and the moon and some guy thinking to himself, aw, look how little she is.

But she brought him with her this time, and he stands at the end of the bed too, and she wonders what this guy would think if he jolted out of his dreams, and he blinked the gauze from his eyes to see this little blonde thing with her curls shiny as polished furniture, and the eyes so wide, so blue, and beside her this man who is something, but he isn't human, you can feel that just in his presence, you can see it in his smile, it's like if Death peeled back his hood, and he was an Abercrombie and Fitch model.

She picks up one of the pillows.

And Klaus watches her and she doesn't know why she wanted him to see this, maybe it's another birthday of sorts, and you should always have someone to clap for the blown-out candles, and the hat tilted just so.

She died and was reborn, but she's been thinking about that, and not really, actually.

See, like, she woke up on that hospital bed and she wasn't Caroline anymore, she wasn't a girl anymore, but you wouldn't know it, to look at her, because when you pretend hard enough, you create a new truth that is perhaps not quite a truth, but is close enough.

So she was still a girl.

For her mother, for Bonnie, for Stefan, for every expectation society makes of girls who are supposed to spill only their own blood, and walk gently in their ruins.

If bitch is the worst thing a woman can be, she wonders what this is?

She holds the pillow down over his face.

The body jerks itself awake when it reaches for its next breath, and it realizes suddenly that it isn't there.

She remembers that.

She remembers that panic tastes of bile.

She remembers how  _hard_ the limbs flail when they realize here it is, I'm only seventeen, but here it is, because they know how badly you want it, they know you were supposed to have a husband and a pool and head chair at the PTA, they know it shouldn't end here between sheets that smell of medicine, awaiting a mother who didn't come when she said she would.

The boy circles both his hands around her wrists and he must be thinking under that pillow what small bones, and smooth hands, I've got this, it's just a girl, just a girl.

But not anymore, see.

His feet drum beneath the sheet.

He twists the bedcovers into a sweaty figure eight and he squeezes and he claws and he makes the same noises she remembers making, the failed gulps like sobs, and doom doom doom in his chest, a heart is always loudest before it quits, hearts are stubborn like that, they will always be your greatest supporter, and thwack thwack thwack of the heels and one last gulp like a sob and the spine arching with a crack and the nails sinking in to the bone-

And it'll be going black for him now, maybe he sees a light, she didn't, but death is an individual thing, everyone goes to it differently, but the last buck, that's the same, and the final breath, all slurry and slow, like it knows, like it's given up, but the heart- that makes a final push, the blood fizzing in your veins and pounding in your temples and the worst headache you have ever had like a freaking supernova between your ears and so you think to yourself maybe I'd like to, it hurts so  _badly_ , maybe this is just better, and your hands fall away and your legs give a couple more kicks, out of habit more than anything, really, you're just keeping up appearances now for your obstinate heart, the poor thing, it tried so hard, and then your eyelids just drop, and they're so heavy, and the pounding's trickling out of your veins, out of your head, out of your chest, what a nice and fuzzy cocoon death is, so quiet, you know maybe the world could learn a few things from it, just stop up its mouth, just every once in a while-

And then it's over.

She lifts the pillow.

He is like a perfect wax doll of himself.

Klaus sits down on the bed beside him, very gently, just the way he eased himself onto the sheets next to her as she lay sweating out her life through Tyler's bite, and he told her there's the world, go grab it.

He can be very reverent.

She remembers that.

He closes the guy's eyes so tenderly, and brushes the curls off his forehead.

She's still standing there holding that pillow when he looks up at her.

Welcome, love, she thinks is what his smile is probably trying to tell her.


	2. Part Two

**Kiruna, 2014**

"Thank you for flying Kol Air, and welcome to Sweden," Kol tells the passengers stumbling past him, shaking from the very roots of the white hairs he's put in the newest of pink-cheeked babes to their tippy-toes. "Rather unmanned ourselves with that final descent, didn't we, Timothy?"

"Oh, I just have a weak constitution for assholes who think nearly a hundred years in the ground qualifies them to fly me goddamned plane."

"Still- two times into the air sickness bag, darling." Kol clucks his tongue and ducks a swipe to the back of his head, shouldering his rucksack. "And really, I actually think I did quite well, thank you. I'm quite rusty in general, and I've never flown one of these before. The co-pilot was very helpful. Nice man. May he rest in peace."

They step down into the corridor.

Mary and Joseph bless the ground doesn't pitch beneath him, and the walls don't bang out a yawn to wake the dead and ricochet his bag with its jumble of guns and literature down off his melon for a reeler of a moment he's still blinking from his eyes.

He crosses himself.

"Don't be so overdramatic, darling. You'd have got over it, if the plane crashed." Kol yanks at the straps on his bag as they emerge into the airport and sneaks him a little sideways smirk might put his mind to a quickie beside that co-pilot with the life still steaming from his open throat, if the poor old stomach wasn't still wrestling the sea legs back beneath it. "Want to race to the exit?"

"Oh, right- I'll be takin' you right up on that offer now, when I could be just strolling meself all leisure-like to the doors and lettin' only one of us make a ten-year-old dipshit of himself."

"You never just leave me to make a ten-year-old dipshit of myself."

"Right. But I never pointlessly make a ten-year-old dipshit of meself, flailing along after a gom with nine centuries on me."

"No- we'll do it the human way, darling. You've got legs for three miles; I'm even giving you the advantage here."

He stops off at one of the terminal chairs to swing down his bag from his shoulder and give it a quick rummage for his pistols, slipping them all back into the little holsters he's sewn along the sides of the bag, and separating _The Brothers Karamazov_ from  _A Tale of Two Cities_ where it's got that big doorstopper gob of it open round the smaller book.

Kol lifts an eyebrow at him.

He zips the bag roughly, meeting his friend's gaze as he yanks at it.

He gives the rucksack a little shake, pats the whole mess of it with his hand, leans his elbow down on top of it and gives an exaggerated twirl of his ankle. "All right, then." He points at Kol. "But no cheating. That means no tripping me, it means no throwing me, it means no squeezing anything that might put the blood somewhere else."

Kol lifts his hands innocently.

"Go," he says, and hits his friend in the face with his bag full of guns.

He tears off across the terminal.

Couple of screams behind him, rush of the air in his lungs, and on his lips the taste of the garbage man and his unfortunate armpits where no wash cloth dare enter, and just ahead of him those beautiful double doors of triumph, and the putt putt of the little taxi beyond, breathing its exhales same color as the sky-

Kol tackles him.

It's a fucking  _blow_ it is, head to the spine, the both of them going down full speed, him on the bottom, long skid over the polished floor with one of the pistols poking its sights into his spine and the ceiling whirling overhead and mothers snatching their wee ones out of the way, and somehow Kol's got the better of it, a leg to either side of his chest, so he just rides along nice and easy as you please, right to the foot of those doors, the taxi man and his passengers watching all a-gape and security with a real head-scratcher on its hands, because who's to say it's nothing catching the pair of them have got, a sudden outburst like that, and now here's the fucker leaning down to pat his cheek and give him a nice, "Thank you, Timothy," and he stands and dusts himself with a smile and hoists the bag over his shoulder, and into the blustery day with him and his strut.

Everyone is staring at him.

He clears his throat.

He adjusts his hat.

A quick pop onto his feet and tip of the cap down into his eyes and he hurries the rucksack onto his shoulder and slinks out into the sun that makes a blind man of him.

Kol is laughing fit to burst his little areshole side. "You're red all the way to the tips of your ears."

"Well, there's too many people for me to go through and try and compel the whole lot of them. Sure and there're too many exits for me to kill anyone who saw that without a few escaping away to tell their little grandchildren, 'And then, little Suzy, the big lunk went ass over teakettle while we was all just standin' there staring at him making an absolute donkey of himself. Oh, how I've never forgotten that in all me years.'"

"They're still staring at you, actually. There's a lot of pointing," Kol tells him helpfully. "So what are you going to do?"

"Run away," he answers, and hoofs it right over the boot of the taxi and into the street.

"They'll write sonnets to your bravery one day, darling."

* * *

It's eight kilometers down the E10 to the city, so along the side of the highway they fuck about, a snowball to Kol's head and a fistful of the wet shite down his back, the cars passing and throwing up their little powdery sprays.

There's a sky for miles here, with no buildings to dimple her.

And the little brushstrokes of the trees off in the distance, and if and he draws a breath and dials the ears back a notch, there's the grand hush of the woods and the animals tiptoeing reverently about them and beside him his friend breathing in this arctic quiet, oh, just the whole world shut up on itself, so there's the hush hush of their boots in the ditch, creak of the rucksack and knockabout of his pistols and somewhere a river jawing away at its busy little opinion-

And him here with his beating heart and his lungs just full of it all.

What do you fucking think of that, some bastard up to the elbow in him one moment and all the thumpity parts of him giving their last little knock around, here it comes, Timothy me boy, put it off long enough now haven't you there, lad, don't go shedding your grief for a little ol' thing like death now, and here he strolls, exaggerated swing of the arms and little skip skip of the feet just because he can, and the cold arms of the world all lockjaw about him and his friend poncing along like some nancy beside him.

Kol tosses his scarf dramatically over one shoulder, resettles it, whips it back down to swing loosely from his neck.

He waves to one of the passing cars with it, and for a moment keeps pace with the startled driver, crouching over so that he's at eye level with the man, and knocking at his window as he runs alongside.

The man jerks back from the window, his car revs loudly, the tires have it out with the snow, into the other lane he swerves and then off he roars.

Oh, he's put the cold sights to his teeth a time or two, and woken up not sure if it's the relief or grief what sits heavy on his chest, pressing the sobs back down into him.

But he could breathe the world into him forever, just striding here along the edge of it with the sun in perpetual peekaboo, and the arm round his neck warm as his overwhelmed little fucking heart.

He sneaks a glance at his friend, the bristles poking out of his young cheeks and the dimple of that chin and the bangs flat on his forehead, and oh, the breath in and out of him like he'd never thought to hear again.

He smiles, a right dopey little thing, he's sure, and tries for a hip check into the drift beside them.

Kol gets a hook round his shoulders with that arm and throws him face first into the snow, and a whole lot of yelling and flailing round and here and there a laugh choked short on the mouthfuls that nearly drown him, and he's let up to take a swing that glances off Kol's shoulder, and then off with them like a pair of jackals sprung from the cages, tearing along tossing bits of the ground, bits of the cargo, coats flap flapping and the feet slap slapping and another stare or two from the cars and then out come the sticks they find alongside the road like any fresh young pair of boys with all the world a metaphorical penis, slashing and screaming and stabbing, down into the banks, out into the road, victim the cap, victim the cheek, victim the poor scarf, victim his left arse cheek where Kol aims his most mischievous thrust-

"Hey! Be careful where you're putting that thing! An inch to the left and you could run a fucking flag up me!"

"That's the first time I've heard you make a peep about me putting something there." Kol wiggles his eyebrows. He slips the tip of his branch under the brim of the Donegal lying in the road and tucks his tongue into the corner of his mouth, giving a little preparatory jiggle of it. "Crouch down a bit, darling," he says, and then flips the hat up into the air.

He catches it on his head.

"Boom!" Kol shouts, and holds his arms out to either side. "Rematch?" he asks, and gives him a knock so close to the ballocks he folds over at the waist and wheezes all the words to make the poor dear ma turn about in her grave.

So what for it but to break his own stick over his knee, and twirl the pieces like nunchaku, and give a bap to the skull he hopes rings the motherfucker's head like a gong, and advance along the road in this way, making general fucks of themselves.

God bless the Patron Saint of Boys, with the patience in him wide as a mother's love.

* * *

They dawdle their way into town round about sunset, the hair kicking out in wet ringlets over his ears and Kol not at all solemnly lamenting the loss of his scarf which was in fact the brother Elijah's.

Few cars parked alongside the buildings and here and there a tourist clomping along in an awkward high step through the snow, shaking the powder from their toes, the round globes of the street lights misting into existence and sliding themselves like sweet yellow butter over the cars, over the streets, into the windows of the buildings to make a preening mirror of themselves, floating there all narcissist-like, shouldering out the sun still trying to make her final appeals.

He takes off his hat and gives a dog shake of his head, scattering snow.

Kol beats it off his back, lingering on his ass.

The buildings poke their little gingerbread roofs into the sky, all iced thick as the witch's ambush and shining in the dusk.

He blows into his bare hands more for the habit of it, wiggling the red stumps and feeling that strange disconnect between death and unlife, watching Kol beside him button his pea coat to the throat and smooth one of the brow's gone all cockeyed with the last fight.

He likes his eyebrows just so, he's noticed, grooms those great big lumps of caterpillar over either eye like any other dandy might fuss at his hair, and he wouldn't breathe of it, but the fuckers are beyond any help he's ever seen in all this wide world.

"What are you smiling at?" Kol asks him, a little perplexed smile showing itself at the corner of his own mouth.

"Oh, nothing," he says innocently.

"Where do you want to eat?" Kol asks, flicking out a finger to skew his hat at a rakish angle. He musses his hair.

A man steps out of a shop just up the road, locking the door behind him and giving it a rattle to be sure.

Kol licks his lips. "Never mind; I'm hungry. No time to be picky."

They both pop their collars as they watch the man set off up the sidewalk, leaning against the snow, the muscles bunching under his trousers till he's down onto a shoveled bit of the walk and knocking the whole mess of winter from his hems.

Stride and a little hop down onto the swept bit of pavement mucky with the ice melt and they flank him with coordinated smoothness, Kol all smushed up against the man, lifting his arm for a friendly squench into the side, and a word in some gibber must be Swedish that loosens the poor boyo out of his instinctive fear.

He fishes his fag packet from his trousers.

Likes a good smoke right before.

Scrubs the taste buds all bright and sparkly spotless, the tobacco murdering them by the scores, and his body setting them right back on their feet and dusting them off again, so's everything goes down this new mouth of his wondrous as the first solids of his faraway childhood.

* * *

"How many languages can you speak?"

His friend walks along for a moment without saying anything, hands in his pockets, the rucksack bouncing against his back, head tipped back to the sky. "You have to watch for the lights, darling. They usually aren't active for very long."

"I'm keeping me eye out," he says, brushing a branch out of his way and holding it over his head for Kol to pass. "I was just wondering."

Kol fogs the sky with a breath, and rubs at his nose. "900. I used to learn a new one every year. Some of them are dead, though. My Swedish is a little rusty; a bit archaic, you know. I was last here…sometime in the 1700s, I think was my last visit. Not here, exactly. I was in Lund. Never got up this far north."

"900? Jesus Christ. I've got some Russian, bit of German, fluent in Irish, Arabic-"

"Fluent in Arabic? Where'd you pick that up?"

"Oh, I was in Egypt for a while, back in the 60s. But, yeah, let's see…" He pushes his lips out to one side, puckers to the other, wrinkles his nose for a moment. "Fluent in five, conversational in another…eight. Feel like a right layabout now."

Kol smiles at him. "What do they sound like? 'Ich bin teh fooking oirish'?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, I don't sound like that," he laughs, kicking a good spray toward Kol.

"You had a horrible American accent, darling. After…thirteen years, was it, in New Orleans?"

"I never heard anybody complain about it."

"They were embarrassed for you. What was one of the first things I said to you, that first time we talked without Nik hovering round?"

"'How big is your dick?'"

"Before that, darling. Let's see…'originally from Ireland, aren't you'? Because your accent would slip through from time to time. The worst-" He holds up his finger, laughing. "The worst I ever heard was this one time at the Monteleone, back when you were a skinny little porter, and you were greeting some guest or another, and you were trying so hard to be American, poor little Timothy. It took you about a half another to spit out each sentence, you had such a drawl. 'Ah kiiin pooooot yooo baaahgs ova dere, den miiister.'"

"Ah, Jesus, you shit," he says, spanning the length of his face with one hand, and laughing into it.

"I wanted to eat you, actually. I said to Nik, 'He's annoying; I'm going to pull out his vocal cords and hang him with them. Want to watch?' But Nik thought it was funny, so he talked me out of it, if you can wrap your head round the irony of that."

They smile at one another.

The rattly cough of a reindeer barks a sharp gunshot through the trees, and the hooves find something that cracks beneath them, the birds holding their little tongues till they've decided danger's overshot the nest and settled in some far distant corner of the woods, and begin to tentatively harp on about whatever it is birds chatter away at, up in those branches.

Kol gives him a few slaps on the shoulder, and points up through the trees. "Look, look."

Midnight's plowed her way masterfully through the clouds and settled herself and the stars in to stay, and now as he tips back his head to look, he sees beyond the fringe of the trees a mist starting on the far horizon, the stars like bright hard freckles in its midst. "Is that it? Is it starting?" he asks, and takes off running through the trees.

The branches reach out for his bag and he breaks a thin crust of ice with the boot that swallows his ankle for a bare moment before he's out and plunging in a great froth through the ditch in front of him, snow everywhere, wet trickle of it down his calf, down his sock, himself mired in it to the knee, pendulum of the rucksack and its freight tip tilting first this way then that, and out into the clearing with a book banging at his right hip and one of the pistols bruising his left and the air like fire in his lungs, sharp as the nicotine grates everything on its way down-

He stops with the heart in his throat. "Is that it?"

Kol jogs up beside him. "No; take a seat. It'll take a little while, for things to pick up."

"It's white. It just looks sort of foggy. I thought the Northern Lights were supposed to be green?"

Kol heaves his bag onto the snow and seats himself on it. "Sit down," he says again, and slides down until it's just his head on the bag, his legs stretched out before him.

He drops his own rucksack onto the ground, and lays back in the snow with the brim of his hat pushed up so he can see.

He never knew the world could hold its breath like this, real midnight with the lights shut off, and the cars gone silent, and above them just eons of black with that cool white breath off in the distance.

"The nice thing about the Northern Lights is that they're always different. So you can always have a first time with them," Kol says softly, and wriggles a little closer in the snow.

He sees a faint spot of what might almost be blue at first, just above that distant horizon, staining the snow. Then a brightening, a brightening, till there's a great flower of neon hanging above them, so green it hurts his heart, all the bog and sweat of mankind splashed to his fucking shins with shit and laboring through it to nothing better, and here behind the stars nature just dumb to any of that, and going on like there's no room for anything but beauty.

The green creeps upward in a little serpentine wispy as a cloud, putting out little fingers to either side, spreading, spreading, to the left a swirl of blue, and the green shooting up from it bright as a flame, with that little blue wick at the bottom, midnight adding her own fine trim of purple to the whole thing.

"How long does it last?" he asks, putting his hands behind his head and crossing his legs at the ankle. He cocks his left knee out a little so it brushes Kol's.

"Depends. The most active part might be only a few minutes. Sometimes it can last for hours, though. I can't believe you've never seen them before, in 123 years."

He swings that knee a little, gently hitting Kol. "I like it. Means there are still things for me to find out."

A faint wisp off to the right darkens, pale sea foam, lime, burst of emerald like a firework that languishes for minutes afterward in its own brilliance.

Shift of the first layer, like it's been thumbed over for the next, and beside him Kol repositions his head on his bag and crosses his own legs, so they're pressed together thigh to thigh.

He reaches out and ticks that little chunk of bang that hangs down in Kol's eyes, smiles at the sway of it, leaves his hand there so he can thread his fingers through it, and give a little brush of the forehead with his thumb.

And the sky doffing one color, and trying on another, and off with that one, doesn't like it, maybe, or has found something brighter for her flippant peacock's heart, and the thumb going across that forehead, hair soft between his fingers, Kol taking the big breath in through his nose and letting it out with that slow hiss of the sweet parting sorrow.

He bumps his knee lightly against his friend's leg again, pulls the other up so he's the one leg propped on its heel, the snow hissing underneath him.

Arse going all numb with the memory of what it is to black the skin with winter, slow finger creep creep of the melt down his spine and vague gasp of the world puffing the ice from her lungs, can feel it in the tip of his nose, he can, probably a little cherry burning right on the end there, and maybe a spot or two in the cheeks, like he's a right real boy with all the trimmings.

'Cept he hears the lashes of his friend take a little dive, and crash land on the cheeks, and the noisy in, out of his sham lungs and the sprint of the blood in all the most tender spots-

But he breathes, he breathes, and takes the ears down a notch, till the world's not quite so doolalley with itself, all rush and crash, thumpity zing of that business of the living and the dying, just himself and the lad, and the little dribble of snow like a great cold piss trickle down his sock.

He looks over at Kol.

Turned onto his cheek, he is, mouth open just a little, peace in the lids still as marble, and that great floppity bit of hair messy as some ragamuffin just in from a tussle with the friends.

He brushes the corner of Kol's left eyebrow the wrong way and smiles.

Ah, lad.

And how many of these moments have you had for yourself, then, just the untroubled sleep in the open world where nobody gives a good hard bumfuck what you're on about and whether they've to care or quail?

He watches the sky for a while longer, brushing those bangs with his hand, his knee just gently swaying, the lights beginning to fade.

Finger on his temple and then another to join it, slow stroke back into the hair tufting out round his ears and he turns his head to put his cheek into the snow, so they're face to face, the knees still in warm and lazy drift against one another.

Kol stretches forward just a bit and kisses him.

Just a little soft thing, without the tongue or the nipping. Reminds him of that first kiss across the counter of that bar, when he thought to himself, ah Jaysus, that was nice, and afterward sat there dumfounded in the glow of it.

The kissing was a wet thing full of teeth and torment, and on the one shoulder his Ma and on the other his God, ye ought to be ashamed of yourself, both of them nattering away in his ear about that awful crime of man and man, sure and it curled his toes, but nice, ah, no, that's no word for a thing like that-

But it was right near bashful, that quick lean-in and the slow touch, and then the eyes looking up at him from beneath the bangs, like any poor mournful pup waiting for the love or the kick.

And oh, himself already half fallen so long before.

Kol pulls back just a bit, huffing a little burst of fog into the space between them.

So they just look at one another for a moment, tips of their noses touching, shared breath from the lips almost grazing, just burst your tender squishy heart, it would, and then he yanks Kol in by the collar of his coat and opens his mouth to suck first the bottom lip and then take a rough go at the top.

Feels the long fingers close round his hip hard enough to dent the bloody bone and then shush of the snow and stuttery bump bump of his boot snagging in the little notch he kicked for it and now the two of them all mashed up against one another, not even trying for any artistry, Jesus, just having themselves a frantic little grope right there in the snow, kissing so hard sure it's a grand fortunate thing, the no breath, no death.

Kol yanks his coat open, and jerks him on top.

He pants out a little laugh as he flops a bit awkwardly into place, lets the hands push his coat down his arms and then feel round in that blind haze of lust for the straps of his suspenders.

Kol pulls them off his shoulders and down with the trousers next, just enough that he's his bare ass out there for the poor scandalized reindeer to blind themselves on.

He struggles onto his knees and undoes the button on Kol's jeans hard enough that the wrench of it jerks him down an inch or so off his rucksack, and smacks a few stars into his eyes when his head hits the ground.

Kol lifts his hips.

He tugs the jeans and boxers down and then he rocks forward so there's the breathless kissing once more and both their pricks in his hand, himself or Kol or both already slick at the tip-

Kol's lashes flutter when he gives that first thrust of his hips, gliding his prick over the underside of Kol's.

He snaps all the bastarding buttons from Kol's coat with his free hand, and sticks it underneath the hem of his shirt, feels up the line of hair halfway down his belly, over the skin pimples instinctively under his cold fingertips, and up round the nipple draws up all tight and hard at the graze of his thumb.

"Oh God; suck it," Kol gasps out, and grabs a fistful of his ass in either hand.

So he lets go of both their pricks and lowers himself belly to belly and up the white and flinching sides he trails his hands, following after with his warm mouth, till he's got to the nipple with the tip of his tongue.

Kol presses his face into the side of his neck and kisses that shivery little crook, lets go with his lips but nuzzles it with his nose, gives him a little scrape with the teeth.

He unlatches from Kol's nipple to grab the point of his chin with his thumb and forefinger, so brutally he feels the bone give a warning crack underneath him, and presses in with his kiss until he can feel the points of those fangs through Kol's skin, and oh Jesus what a surge that gives him in all the tingly bits-

He opens his mouth and into Kol's with his tongue, so he can explore the points of those fangs, and lick up the length of one to the gums with their hyperawareness of everything, and a little hiss and a clench of those nails in his ass and Kol latches onto his bottom lip.

Then down his chin and onto his throat, round to his shoulder, side of the neck, up the spine go those fingernails, dragging the sparks up his back, press of the nose into that soft and vulnerable joining of shoulder/neck, and now both the hands in his hair, down over his nape, and underneath the jaw where both the thumbs press gently into the carotid on either side.

He props himself on his hands.

He takes a breath, and gives another thrust with his hips, so there's the slow rush of the smooth prick skin on prick skin, and the hot ache of this everywhere.

"Tap my arm if you want me to stop," Kol tells him, and sits up to kiss the pulse fluttering nervously under his thumb. "Is that all right?"

"Yeah. Yeah; go on. I'm grand."

Clench of Kol's hands and leap of the heart and the snow far as he can see suddenly going all patchy with red and still the fingers closing, closing, thump thump of the blood in his skull and his prick and then the soft lips find the side of his neck and the fangs open him messily, and he tries to cry out, squeezes his hands round Kol's forearms just for something to hold onto-

The hands at his throat loosen, and the fangs peel away from his neck. "Was that a tap, darling?"

"No; no," he gasps. "Do it again."

And then he's trying to clumsily kiss the bloodstained lips with the hands around his throat and the whole world swimming, rubbing himself in a fever against Kol, feeling with his hands those forearm muscles standing out beneath the hot skin and the pricks all slick with sweat and come as he shudders and tries to cuss his way through his orgasm and the hands squeeze harder and the snow blackens, the stars blot out, he puts one hand down to feel himself spurt, to wrap his slippery fingers round the both of them and pump a good one out of his friend, so there's the strangled cry and the fingers loosening helplessly and then the last frantic surge as the mouths fumble together and he takes his hand away and braces it in the snow, grinding his hips down hard enough to hurt the both of them-

Kol comes again, opening his mouth with the force of it, so the blood dribbles out to stain his chin, and just the sight of it enough to give him his own follow-up jet.

He collapses down against Kol.

They press their sweaty foreheads together.

Kol's hands slither down his back and find his ass again, resting lazily this time, and a long breath and a flutter of his eyes and suddenly Kol lets out a little laugh, and falls back into the snow.

"What?" he asks a little shakily, and pushes that unruly flopper out of his friend's eyes.

"I was just thinking how white your ass is; we probably blend right into the snow. Imagine some lumberjack stumbling over us." He starts to laugh again.

"The bombers in WWII could have used it to mark their drop sites. There she is, lads! See how she glows! And wouldn't it be something, to see me all blown to bits one moment, and the lads and the King Lad out like a windsock the next as I'm running down the street and the whole fucking English squadron after it. 'There's another one, boys! Blow these fuckers to the sky!'"

"'King Lad'?" Kol laughs. "Is that what you've named it?"

"Ah, no; I just needed to distinguish between them. But you know, there was this one time, I was with a girl, and she wants to know, what do you call it then, being apparently certain to her tip toes that all men had some nickname or another for it."

"What did you tell her?"

"I says to her, 'me prick', and then got all flustered. I thought, here's the poor fellow with an invitation to come out flying his full colors, decked out in his furs and jewels, sure and meself just digging me toe into the ground without a word for him. So I blurt out, 'Mr. Darcy'."

And oh, the fucker rolls at that.

"Well, it was the first thing that popped into me head," he says, punching him in the shoulder.

"You couldn't have come up with something like 'Maximum Destroyer'?"

"Nobody names their dick that!"

"Nobody names their dick 'Mr. Darcy', darling. No wonder you don't sleep with women very often."

"I haven't the foggiest what you're talking about," he says, rolling off Kol to tuck himself back into his trousers and slide them back up over his ass, suspenders dangling down underneath his armpits. "I'm quite the Casanova, if I'm forgoing modesty for a bit of honesty."

Kol zips himself up, still lying in the snow, and looking up at him all loose-limbed and easy with the smiles. "Want to go back to Kiruna, Mr. Casanova? I read they have to move the whole town; we could lighten the load for them."

He picks up his jacket from the snow, gives it a good dusting, sets the sleeves to rights once more. "They have to move the whole  _town_?"

"Something to do with the mines- the whole structure's gone wobbly, I guess. So they've got to cut the place up and start shipping it out. Something like that." He hops to his feet, smudges some of the blood from his chin, looks down at his red-smeared hand for just a moment, and then back up with the eyes, so there's the full force of that Mikaelson stare to thud the blood in his mess and fun stuffs. "It can be my good deed for the year."

* * *

_In Northern Sweden, in the early hours of the morning, the small mining town of Kiruna woke to flames and screams when the entire town was set on fire. Authorities are looking for two men possibly in connection with this city-wide arson, but surviving eyewitnesses can give little help, and in the chaos of the flames, perplexing animal attacks fatally wounding several dozen citizens have further muddied the waters. The suspects may be among the victims, but are assumed to be at large somewhere within Northern Sweden._

* * *

Sweden likes to spit on them a bit, here in the northernmost tip of it, in all the vast stretches between city and city.

He's forgotten a little thing like a snowflake on the nose.

Sometimes, in pursuit of your own myth, you forget all the in between things.

A monster has not always his cape and his shadows.

But then perhaps that's the human still in him, gliding along from his point A to his point B, and seeing instead of a world around him only one long blur of white commute.

There is no Nik.

There is no father.

And perhaps his stomach has no notion of how to pitch at this, whether to settle or to heave, and his heart cries at the bedside of an empty sea with the miles his sister doesn't see fit to cross, but beside him, there's the tree full of last night's storm, and the ground rounded up like a cake for miles and miles.

So he catches a few snowflakes on his tongue, and he walks for ten straight minutes on his hands, with Tim tacking a whack at either of his feet, and kicking snow into his eyes.

He sits on Tim's shoulders catching the apples they pinched from a market in Luleå as Tim tosses them one, two, three, into the air and they make a juggler's pass round his own hands and then he drops them once more into his friend's waiting fingers, quite a picture they make along the side of the motorway, the motorists slowing for a gape and Tim shrieking out, "I can't see, you fucker!" as he pulls that hat down over his eyes and lets Tim stumble round by only the wit of his nose and his ears, drunkenly out into the road where he puts on his best panic for a trucker, flailing his arms about and fluttering them round his mouth as the man blows his horn, and then back up onto the shoulder with the snow shin-high, Tim laughing himself nearly sick.

They find a little house tucked within a copse of trees, quaint as a fairytale.

And the mother is too hot and the father too cold, but the child is just right, stewed as she is in her tender juices of childhood broth.

"Fetch," he tells Tim, and hurls the father's fibula in a long arc through the trees.

"Don't be an asshole."

* * *

April gradually eats away at the ground underneath them, and paralyzed Norrbotten begins to show here and there a patch of life.

Oh, frost-hearted Hel, cede your kingdom, as Death must not forget so too is her fate.

But don't tell anyone he said that.

Something something, big penis.

He has a reputation to uphold, after all.

He likes these spaces between cities, with the vanishing snow underfoot, and far to his left the motorway just a distant chatter, and Tim walking silently beside him, and sometimes smiling across at him as love without its need of words will sometimes do.

Here Lies Kol, And He Was Star of the Show some alternative boy with his stone of veined and furred farewell will say.

It was the only way they might like him.

But Nature is not so discriminatory nor demanding, she destroys consistently, not like a man, not like a brother, she just shrugs her shoulders when you wake with blue on your lips, and barely a pulse in your wrist-

It's what she was told, is all.

And if his jokes fall flat upon the ears of the trees, and his impressions stir nary a squirrel, if a clown fails in the forest, and no one is there to love him less, is he perhaps not a theatre after all, but a man?

And Tim doesn't care, if he plugs away for an hour at their journey, and says nothing.

He puts a cigarette in his mouth, one hand in his pocket, rucksack bouncing against his back.

And sometimes there are the callused fingers fumbling round for his own, and the little nose scratch Tim does when he's embarrassed, and that sideways glance, and the self-conscious laugh, more of a soft little huff through the nose than anything, and then for a while they walk along like this, Tim passing him the cigarette.

"What do you think happens to the humans, when they die?" Tim asks him one night, as they lie on their backs in the half-melted snow, straining their eyes at the trees to try and see the Lights once more.

"What do you mean?"

" I mean where do they go? If there's an Other Side for us, got to be something for them, right?"

"What does it matter?"

"I dunno," he says, crossing his feet at the ankle. "I just wonder sometimes, you know? Used to think about it a lot, in the beginning, being a Catholic and all, wondering was there really a God, with all these demons apparently just wandering about, lusting after the blood and all?"

"And the dick?"

Tim laughs a little, breaking up his smoke rings. "Right. And you'd be hard-pressed to find a man among the lot I hung round with more scandalized by the former."

"Right- the asshole. Seat of all sin."

Tim blows another ring. "How old were you when you first fucked a man?"

He repositions his feet in the snow, wriggling his head a little further into his rucksack. "Round…eighty-five or so, I think. I remember it was right after the Battle of Tinchebray. One of the other soldiers. I'd kissed a man before that, but just to play with him. Till I ate him. I'd never slept with one, though, and you're chasing novelty your whole immortal life, so I thought why not?"

Tim sucks in for a long moment, holds the smoke in his lungs. "Were you any good at it?"

"I'm good at everything. You ought to know that."

Tim laughs and rubs his nose. "I was so scared me first time, I could have shit all over your brother."

"That's very charming, darling," he says, and then without warning, a laugh springs his mouth nearly wide as it will go.

He laughs himself onto his side, and lies there nearly sick with his mirth for several long moments, breathing in sobs, and feeling each of them echo in his belly, and stretch it near to pain.

"Well, it wasn't that funny," Tim says, and he hears the flick of fingernail against cigarette butt, the long whistle of its flight, the abrupt sizzle of its landing.

"I just…I wish you had," he gasps, and for nearly a minute afterward, quivers in his aftershocks.

"Are you still laughing?" Tim asks him quietly, when he's come to the end of the worst of it, and has quieted in the snow, wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes.

"Yes." He smiles. "That's the first time I've laughed about Nik in a while."

"All right. That's good. I just didn't- I didn't want you to be sniveling over there or anything."

"That's very sensitive of you, darling," he says, and turns over onto his back.

Tim looks over at him, and smiles.

He used to think, ah well, love is supposed to sit heavy; that's what it's for.

But he was just making excuses for you, Nik.

* * *

And do you know what the little shit actually says to him, he says to him: "Timothy, darling, I think I've been too subtle."

They've just stepped into Stockholm.

Sun straggling through the clouds, indecipherable gibberish of the people, tap tap of the few lonely drops on his hand, salt musk of the sea, mint tingle of the green spaces, and next to him, oh, what a glow on Kol's face.

He follows his friend's gaze.

Big hubbub down near the harbor he can see with a squint of his eyes and a narrowing of his focus, sail bellowing out like some vast air balloon and the great shining beak of the prow, standing above all else.

"What is that?" Kol breathes, and looks its oars up and down like he's them naked and shivering on their backs.

"You like boats then?"

"Oh, that's not a boat, Tim." He takes a few steps forward with that involuntary tiptoe of the lover, reverent pad pad of the boots, religious fire in the cheeks. "It's a dragon."

He scratches at the nape of his neck.

A couple skirts round them and a few feet up the sidewalk slam tinkle goes the door of a little café and a rush of the coffee dust billowing from four different bags and he awkwardly scratches his nose.

"Uh. Kol. Me love." He puts an arm round his shoulders. "It's a boat. Let's go on and get you something to eat, all right? There we are- look, right over there, nice little woman, off by herself, distracted by her book. Have her into an alleyway in a second. Come on, then." He pulls gently with the arm he's got round Kol's neck.

"It's a dragon  _ship_. It's what we used to call our biggest warships. I haven't seen it's like since I was…maybe sixty."

Big church silence on their shoulders for a moment then, just the snapping of the faraway sail, and the sea coming in to lick the salt from her planks.

Sun's wrestled its way out from behind those clouds now.

He can practically hear the aha choir of the angels in his friend's head, and watch those beams direct themselves away from the clouds, away from the city, revolve round to slide slick as you please across the foam and the little rollers of other ships' wakes and whoosh all round this beast of bygone eras to fill her sail, gild her prow.

They both draw in a breath.

"Of course, you're thinking what I'm thinking," Kol says, and looks up at him with a smile that deepens the little dimple in his chin.

"I don't see how we have any other choice."

* * *

Her name is Draken Harald Hårfagre, and she's magnificent.

The water's quieted underneath her, so there's only the faint lullaby of mild springtime spume on her hull.

Long sweep of the oak planks, not yet marred by age, up into the whorled knob of the stern and the proud rainbow of those top four planks, still sleek and unfaded in that destructive sun, and red as blood, oh, just  _look_ at her.

What might be miles of silk blown full in the afternoon's breeze, just yearning to be off.

"We began construction back in March of 2010, with the goal of building the largest Viking ship ever seen in modern day," a man is saying in accented English to a group of tourists, standing with one foot on the lip of the top plank. "One hundred and fourteen feet of oak, with a beam of twenty-seven feet, and displacing seventy tons. The sail is thirty-two hundred square feet of silk. We have twenty-five pairs of oars, with each oar requiring two rowers; that's a crew of one hundred people, although we can sail it with only twenty-nine. The ship, however, can hold up to two hundred. Today we actually have a full rowing crew, for a promotional video we're going to be shooting later."

Tim has his hands folded in front of him, and is looking up at the man with that guileless awe of the sightseer.

He hitches his rucksack a little higher on his shoulder, and meanders a bit farther up the cement walk, running his hand along the railing, letting his hand slap noisily from rung to rung.

The man glances over at him for a moment, then waves to one of the crewmen.

A camera flashes from within the heart of the crowd.

"This is Paul, our first mate."

He looks over his shoulder to find Tim staring after him.

He gives a squint to the mooring ropes, readjusts his rucksack, wanders casually back toward Tim, slipping the phone he nicked off some victim or another from his pocket.

"In 2016, we will attempt our longest voyage, from Norway all the way to North America. The Vikings conquered the seas with large ships just like this one, enabling them to sail much farther and much more quickly than any other ships of the era."

He holds the phone out in front of him to take one of those selfies he sees so often scattered about the internet, then spends a moment admiring it.

His beard is coming in nicely. That must rough up a few of Tim's feathers.

He catches Tim's eye again and rubs it with obnoxious exaggeration.

Tim flips him off.

The man yammering on about the snapping of the mast on a past voyage stumbles for a moment, and then continues on.

He steps back into the crowd next to Tim.

The sea sighs along the hull.

One of the mooring ropes creaks.

Beside him, Tim has taken off his rucksack and is rummaging through it.

"Named for the Norwegian king Harald Fairhair, called such because-"

"Excuse me," he interrupts politely.

The man stops again, a little frown on his lips.

"Hello- terribly sorry. My friend here- it's very sad, actually," he says with that strangled difficulty of tragedy, and lets his eyes for a moment cloud over with that sheen of the bereaved, and then like any man worth his twenty-first century masculinity, blinks it hastily away. "He's…well he hasn't got long to live. This is sort of our…last journey together. He really wanted to see this thing." He looks down, furrows his brow. "And could we just…could we get a picture, the two of us, on it? With the crew and everything?"

That little frown vanishes.

From within the crowd, there's a sniffle, and a woman standing next to Tim touches his elbow, and then reaches for his hand with both of her wrinkled own.

"I lost my husband very recently," she says to him. "And I'm sorry you're not going to get longer, young man. But you'll be in good company, trust me."

"Come on aboard," the first mate tells them, and a few hands reach down to help them over the side, Tim first, he scrambling up after, the boat tipping just a bit beneath his feet, and then he drops onto the deck, and he inhales the still-lingering whiff of a pan-fried breakfast and the salt-stiffened brine of that sail full of wind and the spray of rougher days.

Here on the deck the breeze hasn't a building to divide itself round, a crowd to murmur through, it's just straight from the clouds, straight from the sun, straight from wherever it is spring winds such as this, with the whole world in them.

He arranges his legs like any old sea hand who knows just how to place his boots, to ride out each undulation of the waves.

"We were just kidding, actually, about Tim dying," he says to the crew as they begin to line up for their photo. "This is actually a mutiny." He frowns for a moment, and glances over at Tim. "Mutiny? Is that the right word? We weren't originally part of the crew, after all. Anyway, it's a hostile takeover."

He turns to face the crowd, holding out his arms and giving his best Nik smirk. "Now, I know you might not believe me. I'm very handsome, and Tim just looks so very nice. But here are the rules. We're in charge now, the ship goes where we say." He swivels round to face the crew. "Or else we kill you."

"What the hell is this?" one of them demands angrily. "This isn't funny! Get off the damn ship."

Tim takes one of his pistols out of his rucksack, and points it at the man's head.

He always likes how pale they go.

It's just so gratifying.

"Now." He throws up his hands once more. "You might think, he won't use it." He begins to walk the length of the deck, and with his hands keeping the audience's attention riveted on him; just wonderful what a little talkative flair of the wrist here and there will do for one's presence. "This is a terrible joke, it's not a real gun, etc. etc. People always tell themselves these things. Otherwise, how could you go on about your life? When there might spring from any random shadow some madman with his gun, or his knife? And not even have the good grace to be ugly, so of course you can identify him as some sort of ne'er-do-well?"

"How long are you going to talk?" Tim asks.

"Just hold on a moment, darling. I'm setting the scene."

He turns round to pace back up the way he's come. "Anyway. Drawn-out monologue, some manly circling, a little unsubtle penis comparison, and…action."

Tim shoots the man in the temple.

It makes a very nice splash against the mast, very livid, and now the crowd erupts into screams, and he takes a bow. "Thank you, thank you, darlings. But, please, don't wear yourselves out. We'll be here...well, forever."

He leans down to rip one of the mooring ropes from its ring.

The deck shifts a bit beneath him.

The crew has scattered in that scurrying panic of fleeing rats, but of course there's always one with all those John Wayne movies percolating in his heart, and swelling up his chest, and so a knife is snatched from one of the cutting boards in the kitchen they've set up beneath one of the canvas tents in the center of the deck, and he rushes Tim, straight for the heart he goes, and Tim ducks his thrust and brings his head right down onto the bridge of the man's nose with a loud crunch, and into the soft under flesh of the chin goes the barrel of the pistol, muffled explosion, moist butcher's squelch of the brain, crack of the bone, giblets in the water, spatter on the planks-

He snaps another rope.

"To your oars!" he cries.

The ship pitches to one side, rights itself with a surge of foam from beneath the hull.

It takes another three murders or so, to get them settled enough to understand loyalty is all they've got, and then cringing from their tents, they pair up on the oars and take up the handles with callused fingers.

The sail gives a sharp crack.

He frees the final rope.

Another breath of the wind and the sail swells, swells, and beneath them the water gives a little shudder, the first ripples are displaced, the prow cuts them smooth as a knife.

The oars sound a coordinated  _plop_.

He holds onto one of the straining sheets vibrating with the tension of the sail.

He tips his face toward the wind, toward the sun, breathes the whole maritime rush of salt gust, frothing ocean, the silver bellies of the fish, farther down into the mid depths of whale-haunted wonderlands. "Tim- give them your best drill instructor scream."

"Ah, no," Tim replies, taking off his hat to wipe some of the blood from his forehead.

"Come on," he wheedles.

Tim looks down at his feet with that little embarrassed huff of a laugh through his nose.

The prow sends a blast of foam skyward, dips into the water, bobs back up to face the next breaker head-on.

He gives Tim a look.

Back onto the head goes that hat.

"Right, you fuckers!" Tim hollers. "Put your  _fucking_ backs into it you useless bloody fuckstains!"

The rowers lean, he sees the strain on their foreheads, in their white fingers, rippling forearms, set jaws, the oars rise majestically, dip, break the surface once more.

The prow of the ship begins to glide across the waves just as if it were skating on glass.

He leans his head on the sheet, smiling across the ship at Tim. "Well, what do you think? You wanted to take me to Ireland all those years ago, didn't you?"

"Is that where we're headed then?"

"Why not? It's not a terribly long jaunt over to Belfast." He slips the rucksack off his shoulders, and lets it thud to the deck.

"All right, then," Tim says, and the smile just breaks out of him. "That'll be nice."

"I have something for us first, though." He unzips his rucksack, and pulls out two plastic Viking helmets he picked up at a toy shop not far from the harbor.

Tim bursts out laughing. "Oh Jesus fuck me- when the hell did you pick those up?"

"When I stopped to 'use the toilet' on our way down to the harbor." He tosses one of them across to Tim, who catches it one-handed, still laughing.

"Put it on."

"Oh, for fuck's sake, I'm not wearing this."

He puts on his own, and stands solemnly posing in it. "Timothy."

"I'm not wearing it," Tim replies with another of those laughs that says he'll shortly be giving in.

He pulls two little plastic swords from his rucksack, and holds them up in both hands, lifting one eyebrow.

"We're a pair of assholes, the two of us," Tim sighs, and slips off his hat.

* * *

The Royal Navy itself puts in an appearance for them, chattering on about something over its loudspeakers, surrender, turn back, something like that, yadda yadda, you know, darlings, he really doesn't have time.

The first shapes of Belfast's harbor have begun to appear through the low morning mist.

"Your kicks need to be sharper- really snap them up," he says, pacing down the line of men spaced evenly across the deck. "Let's try the pirouette again. You're not just flailing around here, it's a very crisp turn."

Tim's trying not to lose it, leaning against the mast as around him men work the sheets to fine tune all those little ripples of the sail, and keep her steady on toward those docks shouldering their way into the fog.

The men execute a weary turn.

"Come on, darlings, you can do better than that. Or else," he says cheerfully, and walking down the line of them with his hand to his chin, he stops, and turns to a random one in their midst.

"Please, man," the boy whispers.

"Ah, ah, ah. What did we say? How am I to be addressed?"

"Please…Captain Elephantine Phallus."

"Wow, that's really a mouthful, isn't it?" He holds up his hand.

Tim throws him the plank he snapped off the stern and has spent the better part of their journey whittling into something serviceable.

"I just knocked that one out of the park, didn't I?" he says, and a wind up and a mighty swing and the man's head sails in a perfect arc over the side of the ship and disappears into the sea.

The sun lowers gradually, the mist becomes less mantle, more drizzle, the men twirl out another pirouette.

"Much better! You see- all you need is a little motivation."

The sheets creak, the sail juts out a full belly, Tim self-consciously adjusts his helmet.

Ireland smells of mulch.

That's what he notices first. The whole country has that strange spearmint prickle of a good woodland rain, smells of the spaces between rocks where the moss has put down an undisturbed fur.

It's not unwelcome.

He grew up among it, after all.

Ah nostalgia, nostalgia, you'll melt an old man down like wax, and leave his bones for the vultures.

You know how sensitive he is.

He squints, swings again, arcs another head over the side of the ship.

He snaps his fingers for another crewman to fill the spot.

Terrible dancer, the last one. Can't have him in the front row; bring down the whole performance, and they've really worked for this, sweated through five days of drizzle, and that one particularly nasty squall that swept poor what'shisface right over the edge.

He begins to see the little ants of the people wandering along the waterfront.

The ship behind them bellows another line of gibberish across the waves.

The mist is beginning to burn off in earnest now.

Going to be a lovely day.

And just look at those pristine docks, and the white and pampered crafts floating alongside them.

Tim loops an arm round the mast.

He gestures one of the crew off the sheets and nods at the deck next to him, where the man scrambles into position.

Closer, closer, the docks really beginning to take on mass now, the scent of the damp wood fresh in his nostrils, and the underbelly slime of the slats floating facedown-

A full gust straight to the sail and a few crew members cry out as the sheets leap from their hands and they've got to wrestle the whole burning line of them back down into the blistered palms, into the tired fingers-

"And a one, and a two," he calls out.

"Hi hi! We're your weather girls, and have we got news for you," one of the men at the front sings out, stepping for a moment out of line to deliver his announcement.

"Tell them girl!" the next yells over the snapping of the sail, and the hissing of the sheets.

Tim's going to die back there, with his face buried in the crook of his arm, the helmet shivering on his head.

"Get ready all you lonely girls, and leave those umbrellas at home."

Blowback of the spume into his face, into his mouth, dip of the prow, answering bob bob of the hull sorting itself out once more-

"Humidity's rising, barometer's getting low, according to all the sources the street's the place to go."

He braces himself against the prow, jerks the man standing placidly beside him forward by the elbow.

"Tonight for the first time just about half past ten, for the first time in history it's gonna' start raining men!"

He spits the sea from his mouth, wipes from his beard what he hasn't arced free, gets hold of the slippery prow, dragging the man after him, inching his way upward along that curved and glistening line of oak, the clouds emptying into his eyes, into his mouth, docks looming, the white multistories of the buildings just beyond them fresh-painted against the haze-

The ants of the waterfront are men now.

They have stopped to watch.

He clambers onto the little flat square at the top of the prow, balancing carefully there, the man drooping slack with terror from his hand.

Behind him he hears all those feet begin to tap out their routine, one two, kick, pirouette, and  _leap_ , pop the knees out, tap in with the toe and fire off that sharp flick of the next kick- what a  _sight_.

He'll be so disappointed if no one youtubes this, darlings.

"It's raining men! Hallelujah it's raining men!"

The prow strikes the dock.

There's a great shudder he has to counterbalance with his arms, the prow groans beneath him, the first layer of the dock bursts, flurry of slivers, flurry of rivets, ping ping of the bolts hitting the deck like rain-

"I'm gonna' go out, I'm gonna' let myself get absolutely soaking wet!"

He hoists the man in his hand up level with him.

"It's raining men!"

The dock screeches, a few of the dancers lose their footing, someone on the mainland screams, another one starts forward waving his arms.

"Hallelujah it's raining men!"

He rips the man in half, and half again.

"It's raining men! Hallelujah it's raining men!" they belt out behind him, the prow grinding through another layer of dock, just bashing everything aside, cutting through it all just as easily as any gentle April wave, and he tears the man once more.

"It's raining men! Hallelujah it's raining men!"

He flings the pieces of the man into the air.

They rain down just perfectly, onto the horrified faces of all those onlookers going about their morning commutes.

He spins round on the flat of the prow. "Tim! Sword."

Tim lobs it across the ship to him.

The shore at last stops the ship with a jar that takes out half the dancers, upsets his own footing, nearly plants Tim nose-first into the mast, cracks the prow, rips something loose from the belly of the ship, splits the pavement, redirects several taxis in a fatal panic head-on into one another-

He leaps down onto the road.

The sword flies quite impressively straight, for some little sweatshop junk.

It skewers the man running toward him, gabbling something about goddamn idiots and what a fucking shiteheap he's made of his day.

His throat jets out a perfect little stream of bright red.

The woman beside him opens and shuts her mouth like a fish, pale as the man.

"Say hello to me, darling! I'm new to town."

She hits the ground on both knees, and begins to scream.

"And I always heard the Irish were so friendly."

* * *

**New Orleans, 2014**

She compels two men to fight one another to death in Woldenberg Park.

Well don't judge her like that; they're both horribly unattractive.

The moon is quite full tonight.

She admires her freshly moisturized hand in it, the delicate vanilla tendons, the knuckles like milk, and every fingernail a perfect curve, not a speck of polish out of place.

The Mississippi whispers silkily beyond the railing against which the two men grapple, the shorter one with the upper hand now, one fist in the other's hair, and bringing that dumpy little head up, down against the top bar, so there's the terrific crack of the feeble human skull, and the first splatters of the blood she wouldn't eat if you made your obeisance on bended knees with the silver goblet of it stretched far above your unworthy head.

It smells horrific.

What have these dolts been eating?

She tips her head.

It's always interested her how each human fights for it.

No man goes easily to his death, the basic pantomime of it's all the same, the purpling face, the frothing lips, the final superhuman surge, so the first man is knocked back, and the second staggers forward with his leaking head, and the wildness like prophecy in his eyes, looming Death, O thine scythe-

Or whatever it is Nik would say.

She can't hear him coming.

He's always been quiet like that.

Father taught him so early to tiptoe.

But she smells him in the wind.

And if you stand still enough, and you pay attention to all the parts which are so often neglected by puny human notice, you'll feel the lift of the hairs on your arms, and the buzz of the thunder in your teeth.

She tips her head to the side.

The first man lands a blow to the chin of the second.

They wrestle one another to the pavement, gouging, spitting, tearing like beasts, each trying to get his teeth in the other, but the second's little head trickle has gummed his eyes, and blinded his swings, and she can see by the twitch of his feet, and the bubble of his breath that it won't be long now.

Nik whisks up right behind her, so there's the faint graze of his chest against her shoulder, and the soft whisper of his breath in her ear.

He stands for a moment, surely posing in the moonlight, and checking himself in that masturbatory self-mirror of his he carries forever in his heart, menacing finger steeple, slide of the tongue along the lips, the first word either a seduction or a condemnation-

Yes, Nik.

She's seen them all before.

"I'll be expecting that white oak stake back now, sister," he says right into her ear, his lips grazing her lobe. "You had your reprieve while I let Caroline grieve. But I'm sure you hadn't thought I'd forgotten, sweetheart."

The second man's head falls back.

She watches a line of red dribble from the corner of his mouth.

She smiles.

The first man looks up with eyes like a beast's, his lips smeared with the second man's throat, the tears starting into his eyes, and surely his broken 'what have I done' not far behind.

Don't be a cliché.

Darling.

She leans back into Nik, and turns her face so they are cheek to cheek.

"And what are you going to do about it, Nik? Nothing that would upset your precious Caroline, I hope," she says.

She feels him blink against her cheek.

She straightens once more, and pops the collar of her trench coat against her cheeks.

She does so adore the way it brings them out.

She steps over the remaining man and his little friend and saunters away up the long cement walk, swinging her hips.

* * *

"'The sun'."

"O ilios."

"Feminine? Masculine? Neuter?" Klaus knocks the foil out of her hand.

"Dammit! Um- masculine."

He smiles.

She picks up her foil, gives it a little practice swing, listens to the hiss of it through the air.

They circle one another.

"'Weather'. 'Chair'."

"O keros, masculine. I karekla, feminine."

A brief conversation of the blades, the tink tink of the metal, whisk of a near miss, and all the while that stupid  _infuriating_ look-at-me look-at-me smirk through the faint beard-

She tries for a dui tempo, flicks the tip of Klaus' blade out of the way, thrusts forward a little clumsily, is easily parried.

"Correct. Very good, love."

"Stop smiling at me," she snaps.

"And why should I do that, sweetheart?" He stands with his blade straight out in front of him, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, and she takes a breath, she straightens her shoulders, she drops her own blade and melts into that strange hovering in-between of relaxation and poise, anticipation in her flick flick flicking heart and the slow creep of the moisture across her palms, across her nape, between her breasts, and his dimples just.  _God_.

"Because you're distracting me."

He drops his head and does that little under-the-eyebrows look, the slow spread of the smirk and the dimples so deep, goddammit,  _so_ adorable, and she hasn't been laid in a while, ok?

"Conjugate the verb for 'spoke'. Past tense."

Click click of the blades,  _lunge_ , quick back shuffle of her feet,  _parry_ ,  _there_ , jerk, she can do it too, and she barks, "Milhsa, milhse, milhsame," and Klaus switches hands and flicks aside her best shots like they're nothing, one hand casually behind his back, and she leaps onto that one favorite chair of Elijah's because Klaus won't let him skin her for the yards of future suits, and the tips of those blades kiss, Klaus smiles, she blurs a kick into his wrist, her ankle is clasped, the ceiling upended, the cushion thuds beneath her ass, the foil shivers in her hand, he tells her, "Future," and he blurs across the room.

"Trying to put some safe distance between us?"

She hops down from the chair.

They begin to circle one another again, and she feels it like those long-ago war drums must have pounded in the bones of the soldiers, and raised the tips of their nape hair.

"Just helping you concentrate on your studies. I of anyone understand the magnetism of my presence, and how that can muck up the works."

She rolls her eyes.

A step, a pivot, she fakes for his stomach and thrusts instead toward his chest, she feels his parry ring itself all the way down her foil, and sit like lightning within her wrist.

"THa milhsw, tha milhsei, tha milhsoume."

He looks like a cat when he prowls like this, something rippling, something sleek, you don't know when he might snap, and make that last and fatal pounce, but you can see it in his eyes, in the slow twitch of his tongue over his bottom lip, you know it's coming, you know maybe one second, one day, one century later, you're going to see a smile, it's going to be your last.

It kind of turns her on.

You know he would eat your children, still in their sweet pink youth. And your tears wouldn't move him, he'd probably lick them, he'd spice his supper of little warm doll's fists with their salt, and smile away into the night.

And she could have him on his knees.

Right now.

He has this way of looking you up and down.

Like he can see everything, and whether he's to kiss or eat it is your surprise to discover.

She likes to watch the shapes his lips make when he does it.

Their foils meet briefly.

"I give," he says softly.

She cocks her head. "Also known as, 'Caroline wins'."

He smiles. "No, love. What is it in Greek?"

"Dinw."

"You're a quick student."

"I know."

He steps a little closer, and drops into en garde.

One quick  _tik tik_ of the foil tips.

She can see the hollow of his throat shift with his swallow, and the little ripple of those necklaces lying across it.

She sidesteps to the right, carefully crossing one foot over the other, not taking her eyes from his, and she knows he can hear the pulse in her neck, how fast it's fluttering, and what it must taste like, all flooded with the slick metal incense of adrenaline.

God, she remembers what his throat tastes like

And his pulse fluttering somewhere just underneath her lips like a butterfly, like it's scared, like it's trying to get away.

"'To smile', present tense."

She circles around to his right, putting a little prowl into her own step, and letting the veins show just faintly through her skin, like maybe you're a gajillion, but you're not playing with a girl, not anymore, this is not victimizer vs. victim round eight bajillion, buddy, she's cut her teeth on a heart or two in her day, she's licked the blood from her fingers and shut her eyes until it's reached her belly.

"Xamogelw. Xamogelaei. Xamogelame." She punctuates each word with a thrust of her sword.

He licks his lips.

He's not smiling, not anymore, he's looking at her that same way he looked at her when he sat on that corner of her bed and he talked about all the birthdays she could have, and the world she could seize.

"'How big is it'?" he asks, and smirks.

"Poso megalo einai."

"Today is?"

"Trith."

They spring together, she thrusts, he counter-attacks, they disengage, there's the breath all harsh in his throat, and the tightness in her stomach.

She surges forward.

He grabs her foil by the blade, and stands for a moment letting it cut into his fingers, into his tendons, the blood dribbling down that bright blade, and throbbing in the tips of her fangs where they break her gums.

He holds her hand out of the way, and leans in so close to her lips, so close to her ear, she can feel the scrape of his beard on her cheek, and the soft slide of his breath on her throat. "'To take', future tense."

She swallows.

His lashes are so long.

She can see the blonde in their tips, and the way the sun through the window just gilds them.

" THa lavw." She swallows again, and looks up at his eyes, down to his lips. "Tha lavei. Tha lavoume."

"Fantastic," he tells her, and pulls back just far enough so their noses are nearly touching.

He licks the blood casually off his hand, and lets go of her wrist.

She'd like to back him by the throat into the wall, kiss him just freaking knock-kneed, tear his hair, obliterate his shirt, run her tongue down his stomach to the waistband of his pants, to the top of his boxers, taste the sweat on his belly, run her hand up his thigh, over his crotch, he's already hard, she felt that when he leaned into her, she could touch him through his jeans, and have him just putty in her hands, but that's what he wants, he wants her to go first, he wants to smirk over his charms, congratulations on my face, the ladies are just tickled with it, so she steps away, she puts a little distance between them, she straightens her shirt and she subtly pushes up her boobs, and she lifts that foil.

"En garde."

They touch foils.

"Why isn't it like in Princess Bride? Fencing? I mean, a lot of it's just standing there waiting for the other guy to attack, and when you do, it's like two moves, and it's over."

"Well, love, fencers aren't Hollywood choreographers trying to entertain the lowest common denominator."

"You're such a snob."

She purposefully overextends a little on her next thrust, leaning forward so he can get a good look at her neckline, oopsie- oh God, this shirt is just  _so_ inadequate at containing her boobs.

All-powerful bajillion-year-old monsters are such  _men_.

She almost stabs him in the hip while he's getting an eyeful of the ladies, all gloriously slathered in that trillion dollar moisturizer of Rebekah's she kind of sort of borrowed and forgot to give back, God, she's  _so close_ , but he steps out of the way and deftly redirects her thrust with the tip of his own blade, and God, the  _smirk_ on his lips.

She never knows whether to bang his brains out, or punch his stupid jerk face.

Their foils clash one more time, and then he hooks it neatly out of her hands, he sends it sailing across the room, and then he's right there, right in her face, muscling his way into her personal space just the way he always does when he wants to win, when he wants you to know you're so small, you're so insignificant, and it just  _boils_ her, and he  _knows_ that-

She grabs his jeans by his belt loops and pulls his hips into hers, and then she bites his neck, not with that slow shivery drag of foreplay, not in any way that's meant to do anything other than hurt him, but he likes that too, she feels him twitch against her thigh, and she thinks, what if she hit him, what if she dragged him by his hair and she threw him into that chair and she said here's how it's gonna' be, and she's horrified, she's sick, she is so, so wet.

He drops his sword.

He grips her hips and she can feel his hands shaking, she can always tell how much it means to him, just that someone would touch him with love in their fingers, they don't even have to be kind about it, he just has to know somewhere, somewhere it's there.

She lets up on his belt loops a bit, and looks up just a little, just the half inch or so her shoes don't make up for.

He rests his forehead against hers, and shuts his eyes for a good several seconds before he actually kisses her.

He doesn't do it like you'd expect, a guy like him, all rahrg hear me bellow I am the Great One and you will bend your neck to my guillotine like any good subject.

Sometimes she thinks he's scared of her.

He's so careful.

And she used to think maybe he was afraid, all those years in his hands and her skull just so, so young and frail.

But it's not her he's worried about.

He pulls back, but he doesn't open his eyes.

And she smiles and she leans into him and she doesn't know why, but for just a moment, there's a faint film of tears over her eyes.

So she kisses him as tenderly as she can, she's been trying to unlearn all that, what it is to be soft, but that's not right either, you don't take out the best parts and crush them under your heel because the world doesn't want them, time doesn't want them.

And he just leans into her, with such a long breath through his nose.

She runs her hands up his chest to curls her fingers into his collar.

And then she manhandles him right into that chair and straddles him, slamming him back into the head rest and yanking his shirt up so she can just shamelessly grope his abs.

She leans forward until their noses are touching, and waits just long enough for his mouth to open in anticipation of hers.

She hops lightly down from the chair, and picks up her foil.

"I think it's my turn, to put you to the test."

"Oh, really?" he asks, arching an eyebrow, and rising slowly from his chair, shirt a little askew.

"Yes."

He picks up his own sword.

They square off once again.

"What's Jacob's last name? You know, the guy from Twilight?"

"I fail to see how that's relevant to anything, love," he says, and hooks the foil from her hand.

"Oh, because  _you_ don't know it, it's not important?"

He dimples, and flips her sword into the air with the toe of his boot.

He catches it deftly.

"Yes."

She rolls her eyes.

She catches the foil handle-first and they fire off one blinding back-and-forth, he ducks, she skips back a step, they part.

"Ok, fine." She jabs at his chest; he twitches his shoulder back to let the thrust slide easily past his ribs. "In season two of the O.C., Marissa Cooper takes a ride on the wild lesbian side. True or false?"

"Let me see…now I'll just shift aside Litzt's Hungarian Rhapsodies and poke around Plato's Republic in the original Greek…and, oh! There we are. Right where I expected it to be- all my knowledge of shallow teenybopper pop culture neatly stacked and just ripe and waiting for me to pluck from it."

"You're a jerk, and I like that show."

"Well, there's no accounting for taste."

"I know," she says cheerily, and gives him her most pleasant smile. "I'm involved with  _you_ , after all."

He just smiles at her, and it's his goober smile, it's his I'm-so-happy-to-be-here-with-you smile, it's his I-don't-even-care-what-we're-doing smile, it's the doofiest, sunniest thing this man will ever do, and she's going to fall and get trampled under it for centuries.

They are standing here like two idiots, just smiling at one another, when Rebekah blows through the front door, shopping bags over her arm, bounce in her hair, swing in her hips.

"Hello, Caroline," she says. "Hello,  _you_ ," she barks and a blur and a brief struggle and she pulls away with Klaus' sword, and snaps it over her knee.

She smiles and flounces off.

"I think she's still a little pissed at you."

He works his jaw. "Thank you, sweetheart. Where would I be, without your profound insight?"

* * *

She is sitting up in bed one night, reading through one of her files when Klaus kneels at the edge of it, and crawls up the sheets toward her.

He plants his hands on either side of her, and leans in with that little smirk of his.

"I have a little project for you, love."

"Ok, I hate to be  _that girl_ while you're smoldering at me, but your man boobs are squishing my papers." She shoves him back a little.

He lifts an eyebrow, and works those dimples.

"Ok, I don't hate being that girl. Lay it on me. And ignore the double entendre of that. Otherwise whatever you came to say is not going to get said."

He smiles. "How would you like to plan a dinner party?"

"How many guests?"

"About a dozen."

She tilts her head, and squints at him. "Do I have complete control?"

"Absolute, love."

She flips the folder shut, and sets it aside on the nightstand beside the bed. "Ok, but you cannot actually  _guarantee_ that, because you happen to have a sister who butts into absolutely  _everything_ -"

"Bekah won't interfere with your plans, love," he promises, and he leans in a little closer, so there's just him, the slow ripple of his shoulder muscles and the faint waft of his cologne and that little slow lick of his lips he does when he's thinking.

"Ok, then. And  _you_ can't stick your nose in either. Whatever little schemes you're running, do them behind the scenes,  _don't_ involve them with my caterer, my florist, or my live band. Got it?"

He straightens with his most innocent look, clasping his hands behind his back. "Understood."

"Good." She tilts her head, and smoothes a thumb over the corner of the folder in her lap. "What's it for?"

He lifts an eyebrow, still with that little choir-boy glow about him, and  _please_. "The absolute and complete surrender to your expertise?"

She rolls her eyes. "The  _dinner party_. And by the way, yes, you have to wear whatever I say, ass kissing or no ass kissing. I don't want you to clash with the table linen."

"I'm sure I can find something appropriately neutral, sweetheart."

"Let me be the judge of that. So what's it for?"

He licks his lips again, but this time with the little head dip and the look from beneath his eyebrows all harmless puppy look-at-my-dimples-aren't-they-just-panty-wetting, so she crosses her arms and she cocks her own eyebrow.

"You've been out of the loop for a bit, Caroline."

"So I'm back now. I can take it. I have to think about  _something_ besides…things."

She can hear him twiddling his thumbs behind his back, and read in his eyes that he doesn't know how much to tell her, that he thinks he'll keep back just a little for himself, so when he says, "Marcel was found," she knows that's just the tip of it.

"And you chopped him into little pieces?"

"He was already dead," Klaus says completely stone-faced, but his throat jumps just a little, she sees those necklaces shiver, and she remembers once upon a time ago, they were friends.

He's never had many of those.

"So…these are his cohorts? And you're inviting them over to…recruit them? Eat them?"

"I just want us all to work together," he says, still with that little halo in his voice.

"For what? Peace and goodwill?"

"Nothing you need to concern yourself with for the moment, love," he tells her, and smiles.

* * *

Downstairs, there are the sounds of Caroline's heels, Elijah's fussing about with the tableware, a few tentative strains of Bach.

The rain taps at the windows.

He doesn't see a monster, in his mirror.

Have to do something about that, mate.

He looks for a long moment at the news article up on the tablet screen to his left, what a mess, quite a number done on that poor Belfast harbor, and if they'd just- if some ambitious cameraman with his invasive lens had caught just a glimpse of him, any old grainy smear with its suggested eyes, its amorphous blob of hinted mouth, alluded chin- he just, he-

He sits down on his bed.

His cuffs are still undone, the bow tie selected personally by Her Majesty Caroline swinging round his neck.

He runs a hand back through his hair, and sighs.

You'd laugh to see him, brother.

Poor Nik with his murder just ripe for the picking, and not the heart for its design.

He glances back up into the mirror.

There is a longer singing of the strings, a shattering in the kitchen, the bellowing of lovely Caroline, the first tap tapping tread of the guests beginning their slow and uneasy processional up the front walk.

He stands.

He tilts his head at this thing in the mirror, notes the strain of the lips, the fatigue in the eyes, pathetic, fallible, not a monster at all, not a man from which plots are hatched, battles turned, wars surmounted, just a boy.

Just a bloody  _boy_.

He does up both cuffs.

He closes out the screen with a tap of his finger.

A brief slick of oil to the curls, to flatten their spring, to pop his cheekbones, emphasize his eyes, to say to these new underlings, admire his pink new skin, fresh from the razor, look upon his narrow waist, his unassuming shoulders, see how slight a man he really is, practically a slip, really, ought to have seen how he struggled to lift that first sword of his youth, how he so quickly learned, just put up your hands, mate, Father will only laugh at a swing-

Of course, he's a bit more debonair now, you understand.

The years do tend to polish one.

So his bow tie is perfect, his cuffs aligned, his tux sags at neither waist nor strains at shoulders, the hems brush his ankles, the jacket flows from collar to hip with nary a ripple.

He snaps out either arm, to give a final tweak to the sleeves.

He runs a hand back over the hair, down the skull, onto the nape, irons out every last stubbornness of the little flyaways, fastens the middle button of his jacket, rearranges the collar round that little silver cross with the artfully-arranged vervain.

He does like that little touch.

Just a reminder, if you will.

He smiles at himself.

Perhaps it's not entirely genuine.

Perhaps a brother hangs so heavily upon his heart.

But Elijah's let the guests in now, and he can hear already the quickening of their chests, the dribbling of their sweat, the noisy workings of those anxious young lungs.

And he hasn't even started yet, mates.

Ah, there we are.

There's the old smile, and the slight lightening of that heaviness in his chest.

He steps out into the hall.

He puts his hand on the banister, lets it rest there for a moment, the wood shining, his ring gleaming, a certain hush in the air, like it's holding its breath, like something within these quaking hearts has sat up and scented that fresh arrival of the predator's tread upon the wood, fear has overtaken flight, the feet have gone to marble, the legs to maple.

Fantastic.

He gestures expansively.

"Please, everyone. Be seated."

He descends a step, dragging his hand after him. "I'm reliably informed we have a truly…tender dinner awaiting us. Slow-roasted to absolute perfection."

He smiles widest of all at the young man standing just within the foyer.

"Anyway." He gestures once more. "Shall we?"

* * *

The table is uneven, without Bekah.

Elijah won't like that.

But this cucumber soup is truly refreshing.

Slips just like cream down his throat.

And Caroline, of course- not a single detail out of place, the table flawless, the performers truly astounding, everything just as he envisioned it, love.

What a woman for his side.

"There will be war with the humans," he says casually to the diners sitting at perfectly-spaced intervals round the table. "Soon."

That one he so accurately pinpointed as the little problem child looks up from his bowl. "We don't know that."

"You don't." He lifts his hands in a shrug and leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers. "But I can assure you, it will happen. And with New Orleans' covens on their side, and more help coming, no doubt, we ought to…perhaps work out a show of solidarity, don't you think, mate?"

Caroline is staring at him he can see out of the corner of his eye, spoon in her white-knuckled hand.

"Marcel's passing is a tragedy."

A compelled human clears the empty soup bowl from in front of him.

"Thank you, sweetheart."

He watches the man's jaw tick, and smiles. "But we don't have to let it splinter us into a thousand different factions, all squabbling amongst ourselves, leaving holes everywhere for enemies to slip through, now do we, hmm?"

"So we're supposed to…what? Offer our 'services' to you because the humans, according to you, are going to attack en masse? You want to provide some proof for that? Because I've heard stories of what working for you is like."

The next course is carried steaming to the table.

He waits until it's passed out amongst the guests before taking up his own fork.

He points it at the mouthy one. "Mark, is it?"

"Yeah."

"Now, mate, I can't say I can present any sort of proof in writing, pictures, that sort of thing, at this very moment. But surely you're not unaware that something is brewing, not when a military occupation meant to tame 'gang violence' is carrying vampire-specific ammunition?"

Mark cuts tensely into the piece of filet mignon on his plate. "We're aware. But are you suggesting there's something wide-scale happening here? As in  _outright_  war? Because right now, as far as the world knows, New Orleans is having issues with rioting and gang warfare, not supernatural creatures."

He leans forward onto his elbows, fork still in his hand. "You have a wife, right? And a new baby? Conceived just a bit before you were turned, yes?"

Mark says nothing.

"It's just a bit of small talk, mate." He turns to Elijah with a sigh. "A good dinner companion is so hard to find, these days. You remember that fiasco with the brothers Salvatore?"

"Raised by wolves, most certainly," Elijah agrees, taking a sip of his wine.

Caroline is quite tense beside him. "Thanks for telling me about this beforehand."

"You were busy, love."

Mark takes another bite of his dinner. "You can't threaten them," he says tiredly. "They left town a long time ago."

"Oh, I know that. I'm told they were quite happy in…Butte, was it? Montana?"

The boy goes so pale.

That's just magnificent, mate. He just loves it when his hard work is acknowledged.

"Were." The terror in Mark's voice has just ironed the question right out of that.

"Ah, yes. See, I find a demonstration is usually best where loyalty is concerned." He tips his head to either side, little roll of the eyes, little smile, he just loves that, so cavalier, but the way their hearts just  _accelerate_ at it. "People are so fickle these days; you can't be careful enough."

He snaps his fingers.

He does miss Tim just a bit, times like these.

The boy always had such impeccable timing.

These newest minions carry in Mark's pretty young wife just a touch too late, have to be prompted by a second finger snap, now that's just lazy, wouldn't you say, how hard is good help to find these days, and of course his youngest and peskiest brother would spirit off his best.

Mark overturns his chair, he stands up that fast.

"Ok, ok.  _Look_ \- whatever…whatever you were going to do, you don't need to, ok?" He holds out both his hands, a supplication, a plea, an offering, he must remember this exact pose for his canvas, the precise angle of the lines, the exact etching of the terror-

How fetching.

"I will, we will- whoever you want, whatever you want us to do, be your army, be your little bitches, whatever. So you can- you can let her go, all right?"

"Oh, this isn't for you. I have it on good authority that you'd be a loose cannon. This is for everyone else." He sits back in his chair, and sweeps his hand round the table.

One of the little things is positively simpering at him.

He does love an appreciative audience.

Caroline doesn't, he sees when she shoots the girl a look like a stake to the heart.

"You see, Mark, you have to cut off insubordination at the knees. Make sure everyone knows what's coming for them before they even act. Just the mere hint of betrayal, laziness, incompetence, and-"

He gestures.

The girl's head is torn off.

"Shit!  _Shit_!" Mark screams, and gets a mouthful of his wife's fresh young blood.

Tch, tch.

Terrible thing, vampirism.

What a moment for the fangs to spring free, the veins to surge up, the predator to supersede the husband.

But give the lad credit; he doesn't drink from that spouting stump.

He merely slumps on his knees, unsure whether he is to weep or vomit.

"You're wondering about your daughter's fate, of course," he says solemnly.

He stands.

He reaches into his pocket as he rounds the table to Mark's plate, and for a moment looks appraisingly at it, framing with his artist's eye the half-eaten filet mignon.

From his pocket emerge the little shoes, and the pretty pink bow, and at the top of this unfinished slab of meat he arranges the bow, and at its base the shoes, and then he steps back to fold his hands somberly in front of him.

"No," Mark whispers. " _No-_ oh Jesus  _Christ_."

"What would you call this, if it were brought up on a tray in a hotel?"

"Niklaus, don't," Elijah warns.

"Oh my  _God_ , Klaus! Do.  _Not_ ," Caroline snaps.

He smiles.

"Womb service."


	3. Part Three

There's some dust-up between Nik and Caroline when she comes home.

She seats herself comfortably in one of the chairs at the empty table downstairs to listen to it.

One leg elegantly over the other, head tilted to just that precise angle of perfect prettiness.

What a nice spread.

"You made him eat his own  _baby_ , Klaus. What the hell? You can't just do stuff like that!"

She takes a delicate helping of caviar, and eats it carefully, so she doesn't smudge her lipstick.

It's just flawlessy applied, you know.

"It wasn't his actual baby, love. He just needed to think it was," Nik grovels, and how pathetic he must look, on his knees before such a littlle girl.

Lovely.

She takes another spoonful of caviar.

"Don't lie to me, you ass."

There is a long pause from Nik, perhaps a sinking of the shoulders, a little look up from beneath the eyebrows, his dimples like an angel's, and how many women before her have fallen for this white and shining knight wth his sepulchre dust long knocked off the fresh cheeks of him, but Caroline's different, Caroline has never swallowed any of the slick bits of him-

"All right, sweetheart, it was his baby. But, love, you've got to get your hands a bit dirty sometimes. It's nothing personal. And it was just a human."

"You are unbelievable. There's a line, ok? And that line is cooking people's children and feeding them to their own  _Dad_."

"He was uppity, love. He would have caused problems. You've got to nip that in the bud, so that no one gets any ideas."

"You were doing it to be a jerk. And what the hell is this about going to outright war with the humans? Don't you think that's something you might have wanted to mention to me? Seems kind of...gee...what's the word I'm looking for... _important_

."

She crosses her legs the other way, and gives a slow surveyal of the table.

"It's nothing for you to worry about, love. You're safe. Elijah and I have just caught wind through various resources of ours of a...mobilization. It's expanded far beyond New Orleans."

"Like how far? I have friends out there- you have a  _brother_  out there."

"I hardly think Elena Gilbert counts as a friend, love. And my brother will be fine. The only weapon in the world that can kill him is here. Poor Timothy might be a different story, however."

"You don't have to sound so happy about it."

"He's benefited from as much of my benevolence as he can expect."

"Yeah, that thing he did where he sided with someone he loves over some jerk who was using him as cannon fodder was a pretty big dick move."

"Explain to me why you've taken up the sword and shield over this particular topic, sweetheart? You don't even like him."

"I like him more than you right now."

"What did I do?"

"You made. Someone. Eat. His. Own. Kid."

"But he was going to be running about stirring up trouble."

And so on and so forth.

Anyway. She doesn't hear her name in any of this, so you can see how important it is.

She stands up with a flip of her hair.

She breaks one of the original Van Goghs Nik keeps over the fireplace on her way out the door

* * *

She knows she chose wrong, picking Nik.

She's always doing that, you see.

But no one will need her as much as Nik does.

Perhaps Kol scrabbles round in the leftovers of the Unbreakable Three, scrounging for what little he can dredge up, perhaps he has that one particular way of looking at her when she has weighed the each of them in her hand, carefully tallied brother's love against brother's love and always to the side of Nik tips the scale, not because his love is better, not because it's warmer, it flushes the winter from her long-dead toes, frostbitten with years, she doesn't even like it, to tell you the truth, it's so heavy a thing to drag around-

But to be free, at the risk of Nik doing the same?

Perhaps Kol looks at her sometimes with the eyes of a brother and sometimes with the eyes of a son who has been motherless so long and still doesn't like it.

But he's not like Nik, he's not frantic with his love, he doesn't hoard it, he wouldn't box her away in years and dust just to keep it.

So now you know, how the years have made a stale honeycomb of her.

But never fear.

Nik was always there to shore up the hollowest bits.

* * *

She takes a girl home one day, she doesn't know which, they do blur after a while, you know, Thursday, Monday, oh, who cares, it's like one more brat spit out and shoved into her face like she's to actually enjoy its fat little cheeks, human's little worlds and rules and screaming youth with the slime out both ends are such a conveyor belt.

She does tire of boys sometimes, you know. They're so simple to snare.

Girls take a bit more coaxing, they're looking out for the tricks, they know all the truths about commodities, about the price on their sleek hair and their coconut throats, boys swallow everything, of course they're just so charming, they're in the first trimester of their alcoholic middle years but that's no trouble, it's 'more cushion for the pushin' she believes is the hideous phrase, a bit of wear here, a droop there, it doesn't make him any less of a man-

And all you have to tell him is 'yes'.

And he follows you so complacently into the alleyway where you feed carefully so you don't touch his Wal-Mart T-shirt, and he just never saw it coming, not from you, not from a girl, the villain has always a penis to wield like his divine sword of birthright.

But this girl she talks out of one of the bars after the camraderie that is birthed between girls by those shared cosmetics and hair products (which, please, dolt, as if there are any similarities to be had between her curls and your mop), and chatters away at her with such bright familiarity that the girl follows her all the way to one of the hotels in the French Quarter, she doesn't know which, she just stops and she tells the girl, 'This is where I'm staying', and she gives her shyest smile and puts just enough weight in her voice, and she asks the girl if she'd like to come up for a drink.

Of course she would.

They always do, with hair like this, and her complexion smooth as the initial tenderness of the first years.

The girl is pretty.

Not prettier than her, of course.

But her hair is not terribly parched, and she has a beautiful set of lashes, and eyes round as the moon when they sit down beside one another on the bed and pretend neither of them know where this is going.

She has a flawless back, underneath her Gucci shirt.

She always did like a shoulder that slides like cream beneath her fingertips.

The girl kisses her for a very long time first, none of this straight to the waistband she has to train out of so many men, just the soft lips and the thighs on either side of hers as the girl sits astride her lap, their breasts touching, the girl's nipples hard against the material of the blouse she hasn't yet slipped out of, she likes to save her own undressing, it's a gift, after all, and it's for her partner to be vulnerable, laid out before her, soft as their birthing day.

She pretends the girl's hair is blonde, when she winds one of its strands around her hand and pulls the girl in for a long suck of her bottom lip.

She doesn't know why.

The girl slips off her jeans and stands in her little red boyshorts, and her hips are perfect, they curve out just enough, she can rest her hands on the smoothness of them and feel down between the raw delineation of lace and skin, but her ass is somewhat lacking, it swells just a bit beneath her fingers, she can hardly tell where it begins and the girl's lower back ends, and she remembers Caroline in just one of Nik's T-shirts with her legs for miles.

She lets the girl strip her at last, and straddles her hips.

She hasn't been with a woman for a very long time, but of course she never loses her touch.

A boy would hammer away till all the joy had gone out of it for him.

But she knows how to make it last for a very long time, how to move just so, a slow back and forth of her hips as she lets her head fall back so the hair falls so nicely down her back, and arches out her breasts to their full effect, perfectly white, perfectly round, high as any young girl's, the sweat giving them that pretty glow of health but never making of her some sweaty pig, underneath her the girl making all sort of noises, and lifting her hands to feel the langorous movements of her hips, her fingers crossing the lower belly to trail up the sternum, underside of the breasts, tender curve of the nipple, the thumb grazing, grazing, just for a moment, so lightly, and then the girl tentatively tweaks it between her fingers, and she leans down to kiss the loudest gasp thus far out of her.

She doesn't let the girl orgasm.

She slides off her and runs her tongue over one slick thigh, so there's the anticipatory clench, and the curl of the toes, and then she puts her mouth right precisely where the girl wants it, and licks her with the calculation a boy will never manage, so the pleasure throes ripple all the way up from her stiff toes, into the heaving lower belly, the heavy breasts, supple throat, the juddering arms and the straining fingers, but she doesn't throw back her head with her release, she just hovers on the edge of it, back arched with the build of it.

* * *

She doesn't kill the girl.

They have three more trysts, till one night the girl lays her head down on her naked breast and presses a few tears into it and tells her, "I don't know how I'm going to tell my mom. Do you think...do you think you could come home with me tomorrow, and meet her? Just as a friend at first? So we can kind of ease her into it?"

And she looks at this girl's wide cow eyes and the long brown back with the skin like cinammon and the lips still damp with her orgasm, and she rips off her head.

She doesn't kill the girl right away.

Perhaps she should have specified.

How silly humans are, she thinks, and strokes the girl's hair out of her dead eyes.

They remind her of herself.

Loving like she doesn't have to stretch it out far longer than anyone will want it.

She pulls out the girl's heart, and takes it home for her collection.

* * *

Sometimes Caroline falls asleep in her room, with the moonlight bright as lakewater on the strip of belly her shirt rides up to reveal, and the long legs lovely as the froth of an early morning milk.

She touches the girl's hair carefully where it lies on the pillow, her fingers are delicate as spindles, you know, or they look so, wrapped in their pretty paper of vanilla and gloss, but she breaks so many things with them.

She could break the girl's neck right now, she thinks, and wraps her fingers round the tender throat, and the smooth underside of the jaw, so that she may trace her thumb along the pink warmth of this with the pulse beating just like the girl is alive, and the breath fluttering in the air between them.

There's something about a lovely throat.

She runs her fingers down it, over the ridges of the windpipe, into the hollow of the collarbone.

Men just don't have it.

She tilts her head and slips her fingers over Caroline's shoulder, beneath the wayward tank top strap, down onto the loose bicep, down the forearm, over the hand soft as her own, if she's being entirely honest, and she splays out her own fingers, so that they lie over top of Caroline's, and how similar they look, these mere child's stubs and her century-beaten own.

She wonders if Nik ever marvels at so simple a thing.

She wonders if he ever marvels at anything he ought to be goggling his eyes at, this brother of hers who has had this easy young love with the flame not yet burnt out of it just spoon-fed to him, he doesn't have to work for it, oh, Caroline never held out her hand, and watched him come gently to it, but she's here, she's stayed, she freaking loves with, like, so much of her perky! little heart, Nik, she stayed-

She  _stayed_.

And Nik got her first.

She lies down beside the girl.

Did she never deserve that, Mother?

Oh, Caroline.

She hears you calling out sometimes for your own, in the very blindest part of night, where perhaps even the Christians' god cannot see.

They never answer the deepest parts of a girl's heart.

Perhaps they've forgotten a daughter is only another limb.

"Rebekah?" the girl mumbles blurrily, only sleep has stayed her voice, that fog of emerging consciousness has muddied the first syllable, so that it comes out "Bekah", and if you could feel the jar of this, all the way down into her old bones.

"Are you awake?" Caroline whispers, and she hears the slithering of the girl's hair on the pillow, and the soft whistle of the next breath through her nostrils, and the strap of that tank top slips a bit lower, the front of her shirt gapes, she sees the highest curve of the fresh young breast beneath it, and perhaps there's a moment, as they stare at one another.

"It's Rebekah," she snaps, and yanks the covers out from beneath the girl, so quickly even her supernatural reflexes cannot save her, so that she lists over the side of the bed, flails for a moment, and then loudly hits the floor.

"Ow! Bitch."

* * *

But Caroline forgives the little transgressions so quickly.

She wonders if that's what friendship is to Caroline Forbes.

To take your abuses with freshly-laquered lashes, painted lips, vanilla-tipped nails, to stuff down your heart behind your layers of Gucci, to understand that for your perfect lipstick and your springy curls you will be judged and found wanting, but so too will womankind, mankind, monsterkind, the all of them cast the court's eye over your bare cheeks and your unstamped lids, to look upon your soft nakedness and feel the compassion curdle within them, here she stands, world, without her diadem and veil, isn't she horrid.

That's what friendship is for her.

That's what most things are for her.

In the bathroom one night, she loans Caroline her mascara, and she wonders if this is kindness, if this is the sort of thing that fills those horrid public toilets with the shared giggles of casual intimacy.

Their fingers brush when Caroline takes it.

Caroline's wearing only her bra and panties, and standing there so brazenly in front of that mirror with its harsh floodlights of human justice, not even lashing herself with those girlish lamentations of this mole out of place and that skin fold not just right, just the lips parted and the hand steady and the pert little ass peeping out the bottom of those lime boyshorts.

"Do you miss your friends?" she blurts out suddenly, and sets to work strapping on her heel, so she doesn't have to look at the girl while she answers. "Bonnie and Elena, I mean."

"Of course," Caroline replies, and gives one final dab of her lash. "But less. Every day. Not that I'm forgetting them, or I didn't wish we could have what we used to, or that Bonnie could be alive again, that never goes away, I don't want it to go away, that's when people really die, right? When you forget them? But I don't have to just...curl up, so it doesn't all fall out of me. Does that make sense?"

She wouldn't know.

She stares down at the toe of her heel.

"So thanks," Caroline says, and there's a little smile in her voice.

"For what?" she barks.

But the girl just shakes her head, and looks at her like-

Not like she's beautiful.

Like she's a little dirty, she's smudged her lipstick, she has a split end at the very forefront of her hair, where all might look upon it, she is not divine, there encloses her no Olympian aureole to blind the eyes of lessers-

And it's all right.

What a stupid little girl.

* * *

There is no privacy for creatures such as them.

So she hears the noises the girl makes when she and Nik have some noisy row over whatever it is they consider important and then angrily make up on the floor of Nik's studio.

She can hear his belt clinking with each thrust, so he's barely taken down his trousers in his haste, he's not running a tongue up one smooth thigh, or watching her face as he slides his fingers first over the top of her clit, and then into the wet warmth of her, he's merely taken his penis, and clumsily poked about with it like any virginal clod, sweating away on top of her like an elegantly turned-out pig.

You could have better, lovely Caroline.

* * *

The girl sleeps in her room more and more, she notices.

Perhaps Nik's put his foot in it once more.

Perhaps there's something motherly in the curve of her barren belly.

Is that what she wants, little Caroline Forbes, with the mother still fresh as a heart in her?

To lay her head on this old breast and to listen to the breaths beneath it and for a moment to feel a hand in her hair and to smile herself away to sleep, where she will be tiptoed after by this quiet moment of maternal substitution, chased gently off into the sunshine of whatever dreams it is the new ones conjure up from their human repertoire of frippery and nonsense?

But she has no matronly intimacy.

She can curl your toes.

She can do that.

Is that how she can keep you?

* * *

She wonders what Caroline likes best, she thinks one night as she listens to the girl and Nik upstairs in his study, crumpling the papers on his desk.

She moans particularly loudly when he hits whatever spot it is he's managed to blunder his way into.

There is no soft slurp of copulation, but she can hear the creak of the desk, and the sharp gasps of Caroline's frantic breaths, the crackle of the paper beneath her ass, the flex of her tendons as she widens her legs, that sandpaper scratching of Nik's stubble along her thigh, and she wonders where precisely you must lick, what wet exploration you must venture, to pull those noises out of her.

She remembers once listening to gasps just as satisfied from her own lips.

It was Kol, actually.

He was always particularly good at that sort of thing.

The first time he did it they'd just minted their fresh new sin of brother/sister, and you know Kol, he just gluts himself on what's novel until he's bursting with it, and so they spent the whole evening in bed, trying everything they could conceive of, he says no to nothing, does Kol, and she rather pushed that to its limits.

Poor little brother.

She never was sure he liked it.

He just wanted her to like him.

Poor little Kol Mikaelson, trying to fuck his way ino the hearts of those who ought to give them of their own free and happy will.

She crosses her legs and leans back against her pillows.

She can smell someone dying again, in the breeze through her window.

She supposes New Orleans is good for something, then.

Caroline gasps, "Oh my God, oh my  _God_ , Klaus!", and he pulls back from his attentions with a long breath, he sounds rather overcome, does her brother, but then he's always similarly pathetic about anything of the Caroline variety, and then they're at it like animals, the whole desk jumping, Nik smothering his pitiful little murmurings in Caroline's neck, and then the noisy kissing, the sloppiness of two people just so bloody caught up in one another.

Well, how lovely for them.

She checks her nails.

There's a chip in the left pinky.

Well, that's just gone and made a bloody wreck of the whole bloody day, now hasn't it?

She thinks she'll murder two people.

Yes.

Just enough, not too excessive, she won't risk her blouse that way, but two is such a lovely number, an even number, a perfect match, the one for the other, she hopes they're so very happy together.

She eats a pretty little blonde girl and stalks a boy with the nicest blonde curls down three streets and through two alleyways.

He's such a lovely follow-up to the girl.

He has the widest blue eyes.

She thinks of Kol when she digs them out and wraps them neatly in the tissue paper she carries for just such an occasion.

* * *

"Ok, so I was just randomly wandering the house, you know, poking through a thousand years of junk, and I found...what I'm pretty sure are testicles in some jars. And eyes and a bunch of other things I didn't really want to stare at for too long, but mostly the testicles," Caroline gabbles to him one evening as she breezes through the door of his study, and subtly he eases down the lid of his laptop.

He returns to the little sketch he has laid out across the desk, squinting at it for a moment before adding a light stippling of graphite to the upper corner. "Yes, love, that's Bekah's little collection. A trophy vault, if you will. She does like her trinkets."

Caroline closes the door behind her. "Ok, cute little porcelain statues are souvenirs. Local cheese is a souvenir. Little plastic Eiffel Towers are souvenirs. Pickled  _man parts_  are not souvenirs oh my  _God_."

He gives a little smile, but does not look up from his sketch, watching as the fine little tendons in his hands flicker, the veins shift, the wrist hinges at just precisely the right angle, the pencil concludes its perfect arc.

Caroline pulls up a chair across from him.

There is the sound of her breathing, the scratch of his pencil, the slow rustle of those soft and shining curls.

She shifts.

He tilts his head.

She adds her next breath to the silence, he his following stroke.

To wait is the mark of any perfect predator to whom the weak will always go, but though he smells the blood in her throat, he hears the tender heart in her chest, he feels the prickle of instinct in his fangs, who precisely is the hunter here, sweetheart, with your calm and regal focus, and the nerveless hands like china in your lap.

"Look," she says. "I don't like that we're fighting so much lately." She shifts again. "This is not an apology, because it's pretty rare that you actually deserve one of those, and you don't right now, I haven't said anything that isn't true these last few days, but...I don't like it."

He lifts an eyebrow.

She looks up at him from beneath her lashes and oh, love, all the way down into his stomach he feels it, where lurks whatever primordial clay of man from which he was sprung.

He rubs his hand across his chin, and looks away toward the window.

"Can I just talk to you for a few minutes?" she asks. "That's what I really want. I just need...someone to listen. And I want it to be you."

And then there breaks from her that whisper of the depths, the guts pulled forth and sculpted into these inadequate things, words, which man may use to orate his finest speeches, and fire his bloodiest revolutions, but how to plumb all the stink and mulch of his entrails, where all his worst and most important parts lay?

"I'm scared, Klaus," she says, and she props her elbows on his desk and she sinks her head into her hands, and he drops his pencil. "But of me, I'm scared of me," she tells him, brushing the hair from her eyes and looking up at him through the remaining tendrils wispy as spiderwebs. "Everything I've done, the person I'm becoming-"

"Caroline-"

"No, ok? Don't talk. Just listen. Please, Klaus? I don't want any thousand-year-old wisdom. I don't want advice. I didn't come for you to make me feel better about myself. Ok? I just...want to feel how I feel. And I want someone to listen like it's ok. Like it matters."

He leans back in his chair and spreads his hands over his abandoned pencil, his forgotten sketch, he puts up his boots on his desk for the long haul, and he tents his fingers beneath his chin.

There is a sudden lightening to her shoulders.

You can see it in the lift of her, there is a floating, she is suddenly all seventeen years of her sweet-cheeked death, and he wonders, love, did no one merely sit, and bask in the glow of your voice, in the flip of a casual hand, the drift of a curl, was there not one friend who would turn to stone and shoulder all the moss of all the years to avoid that incalculable risk of missing one essential syllable?

"I killed Tyler. I did that. I was half out of my mind, Mom was just...lying there...I could taste...I had her brains and her blood in my mouth and I just started...pulling out everything I could reach, and he just happened to be in the way." She takes a shaky breath. "But in that moment, in that moment before I realized what I had done...I liked it. I liked being splattered to my elbows in blood, in  _Tyler's_  blood, I felt so good, like nothing could touch me, like there'd be no Damon ever again, like..." She shakes her head. "I don't know," she whispers. "I felt like...that's how it was going to have to be, if people were going to look at me like that, not with respect, but with so much fear, that's how I was never going to be that girl on that bed again, just waiting...just waiting for someone to hurt me. And I was ok with that. I liked it. And that's not what Mom would have wanted, but she's not here, Klaus. She's never going to be here again. And I am. And for so long, I have so much more of this, I can go so much farther, and I'm afraid to see what's next, I'm afraid that there's still a monster under the bed, even after you grow up, and it's me."

She takes another breath.

The shoulders draw up, plunge, she rakes a hand back over her hair, she looks up at him with the same cringing shame of that long-ago Niklaus who wept over his mother's heart as he downed it between sobs.

"So that's what I wanted to say. And I just wanted someone to listen to all of that and not look at me like I was stupid, or like it doesn't matter, because it's just Caroline, after all, you don't really need to listen to what comes out of her mouth."

He blinks in the aftermath of her smile.

"And I knew that someone was you."

He swallows thickly.

"So thank you," she says softly, and she reaches across the table to touch the stubble of his jaw, just lightly, he can hardly feel it, a creature like him, so inured to these casual human needs of gentle finger, tender palm, but it stirs some strange alchemy within him, he feels it in his throat, through his chest, down to the very toes of him, he looks back at her, and he smiles so bloody  _helplessly_.

She kisses the corner of his left dimple, and he looks down with that little embarrassed huff through the nose worthy of that fumbling Tim.

"And make up with your brother, you stubborn jerkoff," she says, and yanks his laptop open to stab her finger at this article detailing the latest of his brother's exploits. "Instead of creeping on him from the other side of the Atlantic. Just say you're sorry. I know you can do it."

"I did apologize!" he protests.

"Oh really?" she demands, crossing her arms over her chest.

"I didn't kill Tim."

"Ok, kind of meeting the bare requirements to be a decent human being does not count as an apology, Klaus. Especially since, I mean, I wasn't there, but I kind of doubt you tied a bow around his penis and handed him off to Kol with great ceremony." She stabs a finger at him. "You better not have tied a bow around his penis! You better not have gone anywhere  _near_  his penis-"

"Someone's got a touch of green in their eyes."

She rolls her eyes and flounces out of her chair. "Also, what happened to the elaborate gifts? The one million karat pendant of a dead princess would be nice, once in a while. You can't be bothered to impress me anymore? Also, don't think I didn't notice that girl shooting you vagina eyes at the dinner party. So I'll see you both at the meeting later tonight."

She points a finger sternly at him, and slams the door behind her.

He spends a long moment twirling the pencil between his fingers, and scratches the back of his neck with a smile.

* * *

Kol always liked to watch things burn.

It used to concern Mother.

"The boy's a true raider," Father would puff from his chest all bloated with pride, and with a look curdle whatever small joy Nik had managed to scrabble up in his presence.

But it wasn't like that.

Once she asked him what he meant by it, what thrall could hold a few silly little flames, and he looked up at her with his face not yet fatted by pubescence, the child all stretched in him, and poking out in the most awkward ways, and he told her they were just so pretty, Bekah, don't tell Father-

A man doesn't notice that sort of thing.

And she patted his sweet, pointy little head, and she let him sleep in her lap.

He was so small.

He may have stretched his bones, and widened his shoulders, but he never outgrew that.

But he was right about the fire.

Just lovely.

She strikes her match and touches it to the shirt sleeve of the sobbing man she's tied to Nik's favorite chair.

That's going to leave such a mark, dear brother.

If you have never lifted your nose into the sour wind of a human smoke, and closed your eyes to all the little layers of such a complex bouquet, the buttery waft of the ligaments, the sweet charcoal of the subcutaneous fat sliding like Christmas goose from the bones, that cinammon incense of the hair catching last-

She highly recommends it.

* * *

Nik has some surprise something or other planned for the girl, so an hour before he's to whisk her away, she talks Caroline into beignets at City Park, and she smiles secretly round her pastry as she pictures his smug little face going so red, so fast, and she sits perhaps an inch or so closer than is proper to the girl.

She remembers straddling her last conquest and watching her die with the sweet pink nipples skyward, and the lips gaping.

Women have such lovely deaths.

There's such grace to the line of a broken neck, smooth with all those oily precautions against the hands of time.

She wonders how Caroline died, if she lay innocently breathing in her childhood bed, with her delicate ankle bones peeping out the end of her covers, and the long swan arm flung up over her head, the soft breasts sitting high and unrestrained in her final moments, slippery as cream.

Nik wants a word with her when she gets home.

She smells of grass, Nik.

Surely you won't begrudge her a shower, she tells him with a pat of his cheek, right in front of dear Caroline, so he can hardly rip off her head, now can he, and she undresses right in the middle of the foyer with Elijah wearily gathering up the garments she lays out like a crumb trail all the way to the bathroom.

Caroline looks.

Of course she does.

Once she was compared to the fair Aphrodite, whose cheeks glow not so fine as her own, whose lips have not half the ripeness, her hips not a curve to compare.

She ate the idiot, of course, for so cheap and unoriginal a ploy as that, whatever her brothers may claim, her skirts are not quite so accessible, she parts her legs for no passing fool, she will not throw herself on hands and knees for any old gilded tongue.

But it doesn't make him wrong.

* * *

In the mornings, they have developed this routine she assumes most be some childish carry-over of those dreadful locker room mobs with the clouds of cheap shampoo and wretched Britney Spears perfume, Caroline touching up her lips as she perfects her eyeliner in the same mirror, their hips touching, elbows jostling one another for counter space.

She notes how warm the girl is.

The thigh pressed lengthwise along hers is soft, it smells of plumeria, she pictures it sometimes to herself, when she is alone, when she is lying with the one filmy sheet draped across her as the first dreadful fog of Louisiana summer slinks inside her lungs to make a bog of her innards.

She touches it casually, once, while they are in bed together, arguing over their Friday night movie.

"P.S. I Love You!" Caroline snaps.

"Isn't that the one with the horse in it?"

"Uh, no. Hillary Swank plays this lady who-"

"Yes, Hillary Swank, that's what I just said, Caroline."

"Oh my God, you are such a-"

"Ladies," Nik says, opening the door with a grand gesture of his hand; the prat never could just walk into a bloody room. "If you don't mind, men are trying to work just outside, hmm? We'd appreciate some peace."

"What are you working on?" Caroline demands, sitting bolt upright in the bed. "If it's about that-"

"It's not, love."

"And the Andrew Green thing? Did you take care of that?"

"Yes, sweetheart, to your exact specifications."

The sarcasm does not bypass Caroline's lovely head.

"Don't sass me, that was a big deal, to get him on our side- I know you think we can just run around killing whoever we want, but Klaus, we have to have some-"

"I said it's taken care of, love. This is personal."

She squints suspiciously at him.

"Well, it's been lovely, Nik. Now get the hell out."

And she sets her hand lightly on that thigh, so long and sleek underneath the T-shirt Caroline's stripped down to, and if the girl doesn't notice, Nik does.

She smiles at him.

You know, once he seduced a man out from underneath her claws.

Remember that, Nik?

* * *

"Do you still miss your mother?" Caroline asks her quietly one morning when they are out for a walk in the earliest hours of the day, before the sun has laid so much as a strip in offering to the chattel.

She thinks about it for a while.

It's not that she doesn't know her answer.

She just doesn't know how to make it not hurt.

"Yes," she says finally.

Mothers are not to be gotten over, Caroline.

But grief is a circular thing.

Perhaps you will always come back to it, over and over again.

But there is a high point, there is a bend, you will round it, you can ascend it, you will for long stretches of your very long life forget it drags along behind you, leaving its indelible marks in your dust.

The girl gives her such a smile for this.

* * *

In her room, she listens to Nik and Caroline going at it like bloody animals.

Louisiana squats on her chest, she feels the slime of it down her neck, between her breasts, in her chest a sauna, on her face a mask.

"Oh God, oh God," Caroline gasps, and she listens to the bed leap, to the headboard chip the wall, her brother's long and shaky breath, the slow slide of some reverent kiss or another, those frenzied knocks of the hips, the strangled gasp of Caroline's orgasm, and the loud "Shit, shit, Klaus, oh my God, oh Jesus-" of its follow-up.

The moon lets down a pretty stripe of silver across her knees, neatly together as any proper lady's must be.

She has forgone everything but a pair of black knickers in this heat, and she imagines herself as she must look, midnight full and marbled on her breasts, and with its tender fingers polishing her legs to glass.

What must it feel like, to lay in sweaty satiation beside someone to whom her blonde hair is merely an afterthought, her lips a bonus, the skin a fair and flawless gratuity? Would the girl trace her hips, and tongue her belly, and lie afterward with the legs in lazy embrace, and the breasts to the back, and ask her, as she hears her now questioning Nik, how was your day, have you anything you want to share, what do you feel, are there any holes which I may kiss closed, and she wipes her cheeks, and she parts her knees.

* * *

Caroline is flipping idlly through some lowbrow Cosmopeasant or whatever it's called on the bed beside her one night, Nik gone, Elijah who knows where, the house with that somber weight of the nearly-empty, just the rustling of the pages, and the soft tick ticking of the grandfather clock far below, the hand counting, counting, the minutes floundering past in all their usual mire slog, and she turns off the television.

It was only that ridiculous Edward embarrassment with his chest of cheap glitter anyway.

Caroline put it on.

"Have you ever kissed a girl before?" she asks, and Caroline looks up briefly from her magazine.

"What?"

"It's a very straightforward question, Caroline. I expect it's manageable even for you."

Caroline rolls her eyes. "Yes, I have. Bonnie and Elena and I used to practice on each other when we were younger. So we'd know what to do when we had boyfriends."

"That's for boys, dolt. I mean have you ever actually kissed one just for yourself, because you wanted to see what it was like?"

"Nope," she replies, popping the 'p', and flipping another page in her magazine.

The room has gone sticky with April, Caroline's thighs shine with it, she feels the masculine sweat of it on her own nape.

The grandfather tick ticks.

Outside her window, the moon is just flush with its own beauty, the werewolves will surely be out in force tonight, with these streets of pewter laid out so prettily before them.

She licks her lips.

Caroline flips another page.

She's just showered, she can smell it on the girl, there's the new slick of the water not yet evaporated, and the soft glow of her moisturizer, the sweet young hollow of the throat where gathers all those little amalgamations of shower gel, shampoo sud, she wonders what it tastes like, if the flesh is crisp as an apple, if it will spring back with its usual resilience of youth beneath her teeth.

"Well, don't you think you should, before you shackle yourself to Nik for all eternity?"

"Nope," Caroline says again, with that same ridiculous popping of the 'p'.

"So Nik's it, for the rest of your eternal life."

Caroline wrinkles her brow at something on the page she's perusing. "Oh no no no, not those shoes with that dress-"

"Caroline!"

"What? God, Rebekah, do you mind? This is sort of important." She flaps the magazine in a shooing motion at her.

"Picking apart the questionable fashion choices of some human who will be just as dead as the waistline on that dress -please, it went out ages ago- in a few years? Earth-shattering."

"No, me time, where I just sit back, and I read a junky magazine, and I paint my nails and I don't worry about anything beyond whether I just got a little polish on my cuticle."

"So Nik is completely satisfactory. You're prepared to have nothing else. Forever."

"I swear to God, you people have no boundaries. Yes, your brother is just freaking peachy at sticking it to me. Trust me, he knows what he's doing. And if you already know that because you people, like, watch each other on a regular basis or hop all up on each other when you've murdered your way out of partners, I really, really do not want to know. Ok?"

She tilts her head.

Caroline crosses her legs and goes back to her reading.

"He never goes too fast, or comes too soon? It's not like boys have a tendency to do that or anything."

"Rebekah! Oh my God! He's your brother."

"Please. I think we're beyond reaching for the smelling salts with one hand as we frantically clutch our pearls with the other, don't you, Caroline?"

The girl snaps her magazine shut, and shoots her an agitated look over the top of it. "What do you want me to tell you? He's a thousand. It's not like he hasn't had time to perfect his techniques."

"But aren't you curious, about the vast array of sexual appetities that suddenly pale in comparison to the fact that you will spend all of time eating your way through mankind with not so much as an extra day on your face?"

"Well, I'm pretty sure Klaus is more than knowledgeable enough to show me anything I get curious about."

She rolls her eyes. "Yes, boy/girl lightly spank one another with those dreadful fuzzy cuffs. Revolutionary. How heterosexually vanilla of you, Caroline."

"Sorry. One of these days I'll have my first gigantic lesbian orgy and then I'll tell you all about it, ok?"

She opens her magazine once more.

The curve of her neck gleams in the moonlight through the window.

She wonders how it would arch beneath her tongue.

"Girls are entirely different from boys, you know."

"That's nice."

"They don't just hammer away. They know how to make it last, just what a woman's body is capable of. The good ones, of course. And they smell much nicer than men."

"Can't argue with you there. Oh my God, have you ever been in a boy's locker room? You know you can actually wash your socks, right, boys? That is a thing that can happen."

She reaches over, and she puts her hand on Caroline's thigh.

Caroline flicks her eyes down from her magazine. "What are you doing?"

"Relax, Caroline. It's not quite the end of the world if another girl touches your leg."

"I didn't say it was. I'm just- are you coming  _onto_  me?"

She slips her hand over the plump thigh with the muscles like cords beneath, down along the hem of Caroline's shorts, so that she has her fingers resting lightly on the inside of the girl's leg, just an inch from the fork of her thighs, where the skin is softest, and smoothest, and she can with just a light brush of her thumb change the girl's breathing.

"Imagine how soft a girl must be," she whispers in Caroline's ear. "And everything you've wished a boy would know, the things you're too shy to tell him about your body- a girl already knows all that."

She pulls away from Caroline's ear, but she leaves her hand.

Caroline's not wearing a bra beneath her shirt, she noticed that earlier, she can just barely make out the nipples through the thin white material, pink as her mouth, they must be so soft, they must taste so sweet, fresh from her shower, still plump with the memory of her hands, and the slide of the bar.

Caroline blinks.

She goes back to her magazine, but there's a tension in her hands, there's an awareness in the rise of her shoulders, in the hand she trails along the collar of her shirt, she knows there are eyes following it, she knows her breast shows white and flawless against the v of her neckline, she knows her lip is plumped by the prick of her bottom tooth, her hair drips its runoff between her breasts, and pools it somewhere beneath the band of her shorts.

She slides her hand further up Caroline's thigh.

There is another flick of the page, a soft bong from the grandfather clock, Caroline says nothing, she squints at whatever article she pretends to read, her skin flinches just slightly, not away, her blood is up, her nipples press in rigid reaction against her shirt, there is a new rhythm to her heart, one leg slides up so the knee is bent, the foot flat, something to brace herself with-

And then she takes her hand away.

"Those Jimmy Choos you stole would have been a more apt pairing," she says casually, lying back against her pillows.

"Right," Caroline blurts out.

"Did you think for a moment I was going to touch you?" she asks casually.

"What?"

"Don't be purposefully obtuse. You know what I mean."

"Ok, you're being, like, super weird-"

She drops her hand onto Caroline's thigh again, looking up at her from beneath her lashes, much the same way Nik must look at her, she imagines, she learned it from him, how such a glance will resonate, ripple from throat to chest to gut, how it expands, it takes up so much space within this little prey, fires the blood, flares the nostrils, sends the heart in that headlong dash for a sanctuary that will never be gained.

She fingers the hem of those shorts.

And she smiles.

Oh, it's such a smile.

How little Caroline shudders to see it, how you'd shudder too, and to yourself nervously sweat out your flight or fight conundrum, and tally in the one column her hint of fang, and in the other that ripe curve of the breast.

She slips her hand inside Caroline's shorts, not touching anything, just laying the fingers along the hem of her panties, and smoothing with her thumb the lace.

Caroline has set aside her magazine.

She seizes the hand in her shorts.

But she doesn't thrust it out, she just sits there for a moment holding the wrist with a touch to powder the bones, she looks back, not so wide-eyed as those curls would suggest, but with the veins just brimming under the skin.

She scrapes one of her teeth along Caroline's throat.

She takes Caroline's hand with her as she slides her fingers down into her panties.

Caroline is already wet, of course.

She lets Caroline's hand curve over her own as she glides her middle finger down over the clit, so she can feel the flex of the tendons, all the minute machinations of knuckle and wrist, the fine hairs at anticipatory attention and the thumb with its own little frisson of tension.

She's very tight.

She wonders how it must feel to slip the tongue inside, to feel the walls clench round it, and send their own warm gush of pleasure to wet her lips.

She must taste of her soap.

Caroline drops her head back, and lets out a soft breath.

She thumbs Caroline's clit.

She watches the toes curl, the back arch, the breasts press their sharp outline into the shirt.

She slides the finger through all that wetness to the elusive lurking of that g spot, curls her finger up, hits it just right, she hears from the shift in Caroline's breathing, and the clench of the toes.

A long slow pump, the girl's calves tense, she adds a second finger, she sends the thumb in a slippery caress over the clit, down the side, the fingers thrust once more, Caroline's lovely throat arches, she lets loose a choked gasp-

She hooks the thumb of her free hand in the band of Caroline's shorts, and pulls them down her hip, so the plump whiteness of her ass is mostly exposed.

"Rebekah, oh my God-" Caroline breathes, and she opens her mouth against the girl's, not hard, not like some brutish man with his tongue demanding its entry rather than asking, but slowly, so the girl has time to blossom to it, and send out her own tongue first.

She's wearing cranberry lip gloss, there's mint on her breath, they both lean into the kiss, so the tips of the breasts are touching, and the exhales go rattly in their nostrils.

But she doesn't speed up her fingers, she stops, she tastes what's on their tips, she slips them back inside just slightly cold with her saliva, Caroline flinches for just a moment, and then her hips rise, she presses forward, they share her taste between them with their slow and wandering tongues-

"Pull down your shorts," she whispers, and down they go, the panties with them, so she can see precisely what she's doing, the sleek shaved pussy flush with her attentions, and the faint reminders of her panty lines.

She staddles Caroline.

She's going to make the girl come so hard her screams bring Nik on the run.

* * *

A floor above her, Caroline sits up in bed beside Nik with a gasp.

Beneath the privacy of her own sheets, with the hands tented placidly on her belly, she opens her eyes, and she smiles.

Did you have a nice dream, Caroline?

She's glad.

A nice dream is such a haven, wouldn't you agree?

* * *

**County Clare, 2014**

Grand weather.

Sun just over the tip-tops of the clouds, and on the Atlantic that perfect cream of a mild April Sunday, and across the way the thrust of the Aran Islands without a shred of the fog on them.

And the wind whistling in his hair and throwing down with the cigarette so he can hardly keep the ash on the end of the bugger, sea in his nose, gulls in his ears, and out of the pocket of his vest the nose of the Donegal poking so's he doesn't lose it to an opportunistic puff of the gales, but, oh, all that sea laid out for miles, polished with spring, and the green to hurt your heart.

Ah, lovely Eire, he yearned toward you all those hot American years with the air like soup in his nostrils.

He taps the cigarette over the ledge.

There's the thunder of the waves on the rocks far below, white leap of the spray, cry of some tourist or another's got her first glimpse of the cliffs, or maybe himself, tippy toeing it along the very edge with the arms out for balance, one foot carefully in front of the other, fag dangling, the vest whipping out round him and the hair just wild about his ears.

He remembers the air up here was like a blow, just clouted the awe right out of you, and left it gasping on the pavement, not unlike yourself, lungful of razors and the eyes wake-wet and each of the breaths like the last.

Can't feel that anymore, of course.

Oh, he's not here to make noise about it. Poor Timothy with the fingers got all the bend in them and the kitten dexterity of him, fucking about right on the crumbling cake of the ledge Mother Nature's taking back one little nibble at a time.

But you do think of it, and feel the squeeze of the old days in your chest, so.

He taps the cigarette again, pivots round to tightrope the other end of the ledge.

Freedom up here like you haven't got anywhere else, just standing on the end of the world with the toe into that nether of death and the heel crushing the green right out of the grass and into the nose, deep breath of the heavens and slow let go of the smoke and how close you are to death, where a man feels most alive, the whole of the Atlantic just spuming for you, wet slap of the salivation on the rocks, on the cliffs, great tongue swipe of the next roller, just you wait, she says with that gleam in her eye, Mother Nature, the old bitch, what a box she's got for your silent weary head-

He leans over far as he can, huff of the cigarette the only gray in this blue, blue day-

And the fucker tears along the very edge of the cliffs, arms out for balance, feet with their Jesus suspension of the old magics you'd think to look at him, not hardly touching the rock but having a right go at the sky itself, and then there's the sway and the pitch of those faraway waves and the sky all blurry with this sudden jolt, and Jesus Mary and  _Joseph_ , he nearly swallows his fucking cigarette, he does when those hands hit his back and it's the cold black sleep for him after all, sure it is, he thinks to himself, heart pounding like any man in the pink of his youth-

"Jesus fuck me!" he yells. "You'll put me into the cardiac arrest!"

Kol keeps his hands on his hips, steadying him. "You'd have got over it." He leans in close to put his lips right to his ear. "I got something for you."

And then he proudly holds up some mitt belongs to who knows what poor fucker, still leaking from the end of it, and tells him, "See? It's got a charm bracelet with a little Celtic cross on it. I thought of you."

"Oh, you shouldn't have, pulse of me heart," he says, laughing as he juggles it to keep the fresh juices off his shirt. "And what the fuck am I supposed to do with it?"

Kol shrugs.

He hefts it in his hand and sends it whistling out over the edge of the cliff.

"Well, you weren't supposed to do that. You don't just throw away a gift, Tim, it's very rude."

He snaps open his hand to show the bracelet dangling from his fingers, new glow of the blood on it and the sun like a christening in the tin of it.

He always did like the little fuck's unexpected smiles, the ones you can tell just break out of him, not for the calculation or the seduction of them, but just because there's the thing inside every man jogs his little switch and opens the floodgates on the happiness and lays it on him like the holy shine of the baby Jesus.

But they can't go on smiling like eejits forever, the pair of them, no, and suddenly Kol hits him on the shoulder and points out over the cliffs toward the ocean and the boat rocking with the gentle lumbering sway of the craft too big for the smaller of the ocean's little furies.

He squints out at all the fresh faces of the tourists pushed to the windows and gaping over the rails.

Kol looks far too pleased with himself.

"What are you cooking in there, then?" he asks, and plonks the fucker on the top of his head with a forefinger.

"I won't calm down, Tim!" Kol suddenly blurts out, the breathlessness on him like he's been sitting here brewing this for a while now, nostrils flaring, the hands with an old man's auge in them.

He blinks.

Some of the heads sprinkled down the walkway crane toward them.

"You're telling me this whole time- this whole time you've been carrying another man's  _baby_ , and you weren't going to tell me? You were just- you were just going to, what? Pass it off as my own? Is that...is that really...were you really going to do that to me?" he demands, letting the voice fade away to just an overcome croak now, smudging away the few tears he's conjured up with the sleeve of his jacket.

"The fuck are you doing, asshole?" he hisses.

Nervous look to the lads leaning on the railing just to his right and he sees they've got the phones out now for posterity's sake, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he'll be on the youtube-

"I can't do this anymore," Kol gasps out.

The tourists with their noses pressed to those steamed windows gawp and point and mist the glass with another snort of their awe.

The Atlantic dashes a good breaker against the rocks far below.

Someone snaps his picture.

"How do you think I'm supposed to go on like this, once everyone knows? It was hard enough- it was hard  _enough_ , Tim, trying to get my wife to understand!"

He pulls his hat a little lower.

"All right, I'm pink to me toes, you shite, shut your gob now," he whispers, and makes a grab for Kol's arm.

"Don't touch me! Don't  _touch me_ , Tim!" He throws up both his arms and takes a step backward, right towad the edge of the cliffs, with the wind grabbing all the flappy bits of his clothes, and snatching the bullshit straight from his lips.

He takes another step.

Crack of the rock, scream from one of the more tender watchers, thunder of the waves, faraway purr of the ferry-

Cartwheel of the arms, gape of the mouth, last frantic snatch at the air, and the inevitable tilt tilt of gravity having her way as she always will-

Can't even hear the plonk of him.

* * *

He rejoins Kol down at what the locals have dubbed the Baby Cliffs, where he has washed up on the rocks.

"Enjoy yourself, then?" he asks as the gom sits up with a great wet heave of his soggy lungs.

"I'm a bit disappointed, actually. I was aiming for that tour boat. I was hoping to splatter all across that front window. What a finish, right?" He snaps up the collar on his jacket, and sits there for a moment pining away for a fecking mirror, so that he might drink in the cheekbones at his pleasant leisure.

He tackles Kol off the edge of the cliff and into the Atlantic.

* * *

In Limerick Tim is having a smoke outside one of the pubs when a fight breaks out between two of its patrons, and what a show, the fists spring up, the teeth come out, there is a flurry of such hair pulling as men are supposed to be above, the shorter draws the first blood, his opponent spills the worst-

Tim keeps smoking.

There's a storm simmering overhead, the clouds jut their full bellies up against the sun, he feels that anticipatory tingle along his nape, where the thunder will sit for a moment buzzing in his bones before the crack reaches the rest of mankind-

Tim taps his ash.

The men tumble into the street.

There's a blast from a horn, the one pulls the other back onto the sidewalk, claps his shoulder, punches his face, they roar, they form that nonsensical mash of men whose anger supplants skill, the bartender adds his own riposte to the melee, "You come off it now, Mick! There wasn't no harm meant!", the meatier of the two gives the second a headbutt to ring his own ears-

Tim tips his hat down over his eyes.

The rain begins not like those gentle American swells with the first polite taps of the cautionary drops, the sky simply opens, God has looked down upon all his surely inebriated oopsies and poured alll the grief of his endlesss ages into this storm, the men's feet slip beneath them, his own hair droops over his eyes-

Tim smiles at him from beneath his hat. "You'll be wantin' one of these now, yeah? Look as sharp as me ownself."

He links his hands behind his back, and then he remembers he learned that from Nik, and he instead takes a step forward with them loose and open at his sides. "You could be a gentlemen and just give me your own."

Tim holds up his finger, cigarette dangling from his lips.

He shakes out the jaket he's got over his arm, and holds it over Kol's head, so it forms a tent for the rain to sluice down.

"Me Ma didn't raise a savage, you know."

The men have got one another into a mutual stranglehold.

"Now this is romance, Timothy. A true gentleman, a first-rate show."

Tim gives him the nose-crinkling smile, and flicks the cigarette into the road.

"Do you want to suck my cock in the alleyway behind the pub for a bit, and then murder these two? They've already done half the work for us, and I'm feeling lazy today."

"Sounds like a plan," Tim says.

* * *

They murder their way through a not insignificant portion of the Republic of Ireland, but his favorite, he thinks, is Doolin.

Just the one street with the jauntily-colored buildings and the nights of sloppy carousing at Gus O'Connors, where Tim pokes out of his shell long enough to fiddle his way through a whole slew of reels he just knocks out off the top of his head, pink-cheeked with drink, his shirt sleeves turned back so you can see all the dextrous little shifts of the left forearm.

There's a field where the teenagers like to congegrate for those little rebellions of small town existence, just overlooking the town, the jigsaw of the Burren to their backs, that Atlantic foam of bitter April just ahead.

They belly out in the grass behind a particularly large stone to wait for them.

The sea has conspired with the moon, there is that perfect gauze of mist that makes a demon of everything, civilization's cheerful yellow stops just inches beyond its doors, the telltale hearts in their careless young chests must sound the procession through the veil.

He cocks his head as he listens to them.

There's drink in their steps, and lust in one pair of hands or another, for there's the rustling detour off into the grass, and the halting of the main group, the bawdy cries, and the surreptitious giggling, that noisy slurping of the inept, another hazing, and at last the return sizzling of the grass, and the main path vibrating beneath their feet once more.

Tim shifts beside him.

He shuts his eyes to place them all, the phlegmy struggle of the fat boy on the left, the little slip of a girl beside him who hardly stirs a blade, the cheap vanilla pretention of the town tart in their midst.

He inhales.

The boy on the right flank has just recently masturbated.

The girl on the left has three new piercings, recently removed, he can smell the blood of their reopening, he can taste on his tongue that heady union of cold silver, warm copper, Tim has caught wind of it now as well, he can feel it in the sudden tension of his hip, and the shivery little sigh through his nose.

The mist brings out all those little subtleties of humanity dry skin will not yield, the tart's perfume is heightened, the boy's moist fatness is magnified, the girl's raw ears drop Tim's fangs over his lip.

He likes that.

The unbearded cheeks, the eyes that surely have not seen so much as a stray ankle beneath demure skirts, those unthreatening hands, large but not gnarled, not marked by anything more than a few dings of the old labor by which every man used to make his way.

And the teeth so bright in this gray slithering all round them.

He lets his own fangs lengthen over his lip, and he gets up quietly, with a crack of his neck.

Tim rises beside him.

There's no need to rush things of course, darling.

First is just that anonymous whoosh in the dark to lift the hairs on their arms.

"Wait, you guys, is someone else out here?" one of them asks.

Of course not, they assure him.

You're fuckin' drunk is all, Jimmy, now sit down and have a smoke, lad.

Tim blurs down just below the lip of the hill, and with calculated deliberation, stomps his feet on the path as he crests it, so they can hear him coming, and lean forward in their sudden understanding, it's only earth after all, Ireland has not put out her arms to cradle them gently away from those nightly horrors of that far distant planet, The Rest of the World, where men have not the sense and the Guinness to just live among Mother Nature's fine green treasures.

So they wait strained up onto their tippy toes with their flight or fight, and each to himself thinking of the most recent Poe bludgeoned down his throat.

There is utter silence.

He stalks along their fringes as they stand watching Tim saunter along toward them, his hat low, the fog perched on its brim, hands in his pockets.

How must he look to them, his broad shoulders merely a suggestion, his lean waist a faint outline, the angelic boy's face in its death's shroud of moonless midnight.

And then Tim takes out his cigarette packet, taps it twice against his hand, flicks his lighter, curses when it doesn't catch, touches it at last to the edge of his smoke-

And they relax.

You can hear the muscles loosening all around him.

Just a man, out for his smoke, needs to burn off his drink, perhaps, or his fight with his wife, he's not even particularly imposing, his shoulders are broad, but he's no monstrosity of modern athletics, look at the slim hips, and the lean waist, there's two of him to the one Jimmy, he is only just a singular man, after all.

He walks past them, turning his head for that one casual surveyal as he goes, blowing smoke.

"Wait- did you see his face?" one of them whispers as he slips past them.

"Oh, Jaysus, would you shut your gob? What's your problem tonight, Paddy?"

"Don't you be fucking talking to me like that! Something was wrong with his face! I saw it!"

"Oh, come off it, now. Don't be tryin' to scare the girls."

He gusts past them, just close enough to the fat little Jimmy that he can feel the light graze of something, he slaps at his sleeves, he thinks to himself, oughtn't I to pipe up, and get us the bejaysus out of here, but he won't, not yet, not in front of the girls, not a boy like him, who must be a man in all things, if anyone is to overlook his soft belly, his distended chin.

Tim creeps up beside him, the cigarette gone.

They let the group pace on a ways up the road, the nerves dying out of their chatter as it always does when one is young, and the night is younger, there's the good slosh in your gut, and that great bravado of a pretty woman to your left.

They fan out across the road, so there's just a narrow gap between their shoulders, to let the mist through.

It's what he was always meant to be doing, stalking along after something stupider, slower, less durable.

You can't understand it, there's a singing inside him, everything leans toward these unknowing prey, he feels what is the only thing left of happiness to men like him, he looks across in this euphoric moment toward Tim, with the crown of mist riding along on his cap, and the nape hair slippery with sea breeze, and for a moment Nik, Rebekah, Elijah, they fall away, he digs for them a little pit, and one day, oh one day, they're not going to climb up after him anymore.

And they can howl at the moon, and drive their cars too fast, and time will not separate them, there will be no wedges driven from man or monster?

He nods at Tim.

Tim whisks past the front of the group.

He flashes past the rear.

They stop, and one of the girls calls out, "Ok, guys, let's just go back, I'm really freaked out, ok, and I just think-"

Tim looms up in front of her.

She screams.

He grabs one of the boys at the back of the group, and bites him so hard there is a jet of blood from his neck that soaks the girl beside him.

There is the predicted chaos after that. The screaming, the running, the best of them who always still exists, who always goes back for his friend, and tries with tears streaming down his face to drag him off to safety.

He strolls leisurely after the one pulling the boy whose throat he has ripped beyond repair.

He snaps his neck.

One of the girls is watching, she's gotten turned round by either Tim or the mist, she's stumbled across this and is frozen by it.

She trembles a very nice tinkling from her earrings.

He watches her listen to Tim killing one of her friends.

He smiles. "There, there, darling. You're only human. This can't last forever, right?"

* * *

In Dublin they enroll in Trinity College, very by-the-book (he even has a pair of glasses, you'd just kill to see him in them, what was evolution thinking, when it carved a face like this, how is the earth to manage its joy), Tim off to the literature program and he to the sciences.

The professor of one of his math classes (can he be bothered to remember which, he thinks not, darlings) is quite the upstanding older chap. Mid-forties, one mildly pretty wife, two equally bland children.

There's a stone wall in the background of the picture on his desk.

His children have left a slew of academic awards across his desk.

His record, he is assured through the glassily smiling lips of the administration, is simply outstanding.

Did you know, his heart accelerates whenever he has to lean across those strong young shoulders of the penis-wielding members of his class.

It's not much work at all, to talk him round to a Friday morning headline.

Married Professor At Forefront Of Gay Scandal Involving Two Students

Spoiler alert, he believes is the meme.

He doesn't make it.

It's not, understand, that he didn't enjoy watching Tim's cock sliding in and out of the man's mouth, his legs dangling down the professor's desk, his hands knotted in the fine black hair just beginning to gray at the temples, and on his face that look he so seldom gets to see, himself usually the one busy between Tim's legs.

In fact, he unzipped his jeans and pulled out his own cock, and he stroked himself till his toes curled, with Tim watching him over the professor's head.

But you know how lovers get.

So touchy about some things.

"If you don't want anyone else sucking me cock, you just have to say the word," Tim tells him, staring up at the man swinging from Parnell's hand in the early pre-church hours of a quiet Sunday.

He gestures dismissively at the statue with its hand buried to the wrist in a particularly vital part of the man's. "I'm making a political statement."

"Against what? Them bloody queers?" Tim puts his hands in his pockets. "Is that what you're going to do to me bollocks, then, if you catch me putting the shine on some other lad's prick?"

He opens his mouth to protest.

"Ah, you don't need to be worrying about it, lad," Tim tells him gently, and turns to walk back down O'Connell street before it begins to shake off its slumber. "Just ask yourself what you're all right with, then, before hatching your schemes. Not what you're too scared to be all right with. Just what you want."

* * *

In Killarney they steal a jaunting car and lash it toward the National Park like a bat out of hell, if he's remembering the saying correctly.

It's a nice day, a very clear day, you can see the police lights for miles, he imagines, and the profiles of he and Tim in the sunlight, what a marvel, right, darlings, Tim's freckles, his classic nose, there'll be a monument to this moment in time, mark his words, these are the faces destined for stone immortality.

He takes a corner onto a little road bracketed on both sides by a stone wall too fast.

The horse wavers with this shifting of its load, the car leaps up onto two wheels, Tim grabs for the side of the car, a horn blasts one long warning.

Blur of the green fields to either side, melting of the stone wall, the yellow lines merely a flicker, Ireland raw in his nostrils, Tim's hat lusting free of his head, into the wind, into the morning, the reins chafing his hands, the horse snorting his struggle-

He wheels the car down another road, out into oncoming traffic, the car rocks, his shoulder slams Tim's, the horse straightens himself valiantly.

"Do you think they'll start shooting at us?" he asks as the police cars squeal their pursuit round the corner and into the wrong lane.

"They don't carry guns, the Irish coppers. Not unless you bring the special units down on your head."

"And how do we do that?" He slaps the reins.

Tim pulls his gun.

He leans out over the side of the car, fires once, there is that apocalyptic shattering of the glass, such a noisy thing, you'd think the whole bloody world was ending, shriek of the tires, crunch of that tin can nose into the stone wall-

Tim ducks back inside. "That ought to do it."

"Do you have another gun?" he asks.

"And what kind of a question is that, now?" Tim demands, unzipping his rucksack so that a mere peek inside it shows a jumble to shame any modern freedom fighter.

"Are those explosives?"

"Gelignite, yeah. You never know when you need a boom."

He puts the reins in his teeth. "If we were human, this is when I'd propose. Hand me two of your pistols, darling."

"Now you be careful with those, then, don't be knocking them round- you'll be marring the finish like that," Tim cautions, passing across the gun in his hand and then another he pulls from the rucksack.

He holds one in either hand, and points them skyward, reins still between his teeth. "Look, I'm American!" he says, and fires them into the air.

"Ah, Jaysus, lad, where's your yodel, then?"

"Do the Americans yodel now?"

"No, your what's it...Jesus Mary and Joseph...your yee-haw!" Tim smacks him on the arm. "That's what I meant."

"Yee haaaaw!" he shrieks into the wind, and fires them once more.

Three men walking down the sidewalk flatten themselves against it.

The horse flinches, but what a beast, as Nik would say, it plunges bravely on, frothing at the mouth, foaming from its flanks.

He drives it all the way down past the Muckross House with the sirens wailing behind them, past the entrance to the Torc Waterfall, into the brush across the road, through the heather, onto the little jaunting car lane, where the horse stumbles, his hooves catch, his muscles fail him, he sinks forward to surrender on his shaking knees, the car lurches forward, Tim jumps free, he bails out the other side-

The first police car bounces onto the little dirt lane.

Tim nimbly leaps the fence running the length of the lane, rucksack over his shoulder.

"Stop! Come back now, lads, onto your knees-"

Tim turns and shoots the man through the throat.

He springs gracefully to the top of the fence, balances there for a moment, drops down onto the other side, into the grass beside Tim, who takes off across the field for all those long legs are worth.

There's a thunderstorm crack from behind him, the whistling of the bullet just missing his ear, Tim turns, he drops the shooter with a single blast, adjusts his hat, swings round, kills the next with such concentration on his face, you can see how much it means to him, that his bullet not land merely fatally but perfectly, that the man spouts not one centimeter off the right brow but from directly between the eyes.

They wait until the men have sheltered behind the boots of their cars, and vanish across the field, into the trees all the way on the other side of it, where Tim reloads, he cracks his neck, they both squint over at one another in the sun. "What's that Muckross House we passed on our way out here?" he asks.

"It's an old mansion. Historical site. Had the Queen Victoria up there back in the 1860s. Nice gardens; used to toddle down with the Ma when I was a wee thing and feed the birds round the grounds. And when I was a bit older, I'd sneak in to poke round the house a bit. Never seen one that grand before."

"Historical site, you say?"

"Very carefully preserved. On their official tours through the house, you can't even take pictures; the light fucks up the fixtures. Got everything temperature controlled, even."

He thumbs the dimple in his chin. "Sounds like they've taken very good care of it," he says thoughtfully, and when the police have cleared out from round their vehicles, and cautiously fanned out to search through the woods for their slippery villains, they steal one of the cars, and send it screaming back up the road to this Muckross House, and crash it right through the original kitchen and into the wine cellar.

He pops his shoulder back into place and waits for his broken leg to heal, then sets about turning on all the lights, and casually smashing anything which breaks when you dropkick it into the adjoining room.

He fucks Tim over the billiards table in the game room.

It's quite splendid. The shining maple, the fresh green baize bright as any of Ireland's piously watered lawns.

Tim cracks the sides when he bears down to ride out his orgasm, and comes all across one of the pockets.

* * *

Ireland flees before them.

It's not conscious, there is no intention, there is nothing overt in Tim's fair face, and his nineteen years, after all, just two men, two boys really, taking the piss out of one another on the side of the road, but the cars turn back, the hikers halt so many feet away, they are unaccosted by all but rain, there is an apocalyptic privacy to their journey, with naught but the cows chewing their unconcerned cud off in the distance.

The heather ripples like wheat.

When the sun burns overhead, and you can see for miles why men have watered their crops with as much blood as storm, he tips his face back and he just breathes.

And beside him, Tim stops, and standing ankle-deep in gorse and peat, he hooks his thumbs through the straps of his rucksack, and on his face is writ all the love of his heart, he looks at no man as he gazes upon Ireland, and he thinks, that's how he used to look at Nik, a very long time ago.

A big brother is so hard to wrest from his pedestal.

But slowly, slowly.

You can nurse your griefs if you like, fold them close to your breast till they have outgrown what you can carry, that's all right, but when they start to hurt, when they pull at you with teeth, you have to begin the weaning, Nik.

There's something about an open field.

He can lie down in it and look straight up at something larger than he, older than he, it's just present, it's not demanding, perhaps it warms his cheeks, or wets his hair, but it doesn't hang on him, it's not like time, it's forever, but it's not brazen about it, it doesn't want you to know here is each molecule of my existence, feel them on your every pore, balance them on your shoulders though they buckle your knees, and bow your spine, and keep going.

He can't remember how many moments like these he's had, when he's not performing, he's just quiet in the grass beside a friend, his quips are not coins to be paid out for self-worth.

Tim kisses him lazily on the neck, and puts a hand lightly on his knee.

They watch the clouds gather for their obligatory squall.

"Why'd you go back to New Orleans?" he asks quietly, and he'd like to say it's unconsciously, he'd like to say he didn't need to reach, but he slips his hand over Tim's and laces their fingers, and the fingers are long, and warm with the sun, there's a little malformed bump on Tim's thumb, where he broke it before he was turned, and it just-

It just makes him feel better.

"I go back every year, for me Ma's birthday. She's got no one else, and that's no way to be dead, is it?"

No, darling.

Not at all.

The first drop grazes his cheek, the second pricks his hand.

Tim runs a thumb along his knuckles, and works his shoulders down into the gorse. "I love the smell of the heather in the rain."

"It smells a little like coconuts. I never knew that, actually." He smiles.

So you see, Nik, Bekah, Elijah, there is a life after you, he even has new things to uncover, he won't lie molding away in his boredom, and turn back because your familiarity is better.

* * *

They beat a man to death with the jack he was using to change his flat tire.

Of course there are still new things for him to unearth, but there's such monotony in a long and victimless night, darlings.

The car is nothing special, but he's rather in the mood to claim his spoils, so they leave the man in the middle of the road and throw their rucksacks into the back seat, where Tim stretches himself out, head on his pack, feet on Kol's.

He keeps the window rolled down, so the man's death stays pungent as long as possible, and there's another scent on the wind, that bittersweet tease of all man's little excretions, the chemicals he uses to mask them, the fresh-baked temptation of a throat not out of its 30s.

He hits a pothole at 100 mph.

That's going to leave a mark on the axles.

"There's someone a ways up the road. Should we see if they need a ride?"

"Yeah; I'm still hungry," Tim replies, and pulls a book out from behind his head.

But it's not a man, he realizes as he pushes the car just a bit faster. The heart's too fast, the sweat is not right, there is a swagger in the step that belongs to no mere mortal on a chilly midnight.

He slows the car.

Tim flips a page, resettles his head on his rucksack.

The man thrusts out his arm, thumb up.

He's rather smirky-looking. Good shoulders, self-confidece of a lothario, you can feel it from here, now this, darlings- this is a monster who has not spent his leisurely country walk crying over the blood in his teeth, and when the breeze makes a stiff peak of his hair, he doesn't comb it back into place, he stands with it scattered across his brow, knowing he's windblown and all the handsomer for it.

He could perhaps not eat this man.

The man pops open the passenger door, and in the back seat Tim sits up.

"Hello there, mate. You wouldn't be the two gentlemen who crashed the viking ship into Belfast, now would you?" the stranger says in the same lofty accent he and his family have for years cultivated.

"Guilty, I confess," he replies. "Big fan, I assume? Of course you are."

The man smiles, just the one side of his mouth lifting, and the wind putting another peak in his hair.

"The name's Enzo."

* * *

**New Orleans, 2014**

She avoids Rebekah for a while after that dream, it's just a teensy freaking bit awkward, you don't for months cultivate your newest bestie from this heinous old thing of claws and teeth and Gucci and then undress her behind your eyes, and place her naked and writhing on top of you, oh my  _God_ , and next to your freaking boyfriend, eternal...man companion, whatever, what is  _wrong_  with her-

But the girl is freaking everywhere, wouldn't you know it.

So one morning, she's standing before the mirror, just beyond her is Rebekah undressing for her shower, she has her mascara in hand, she can feel the plastic sweating beneath her fingers, there's this anticipatory tingle in her, she feels the sizzle of it in her stomach, throat, belly, she takes a breath through her nostrils, there's the flash of white and delicate shoulder through the sleeve Rebekah slides down her arm-

And she peeks.

Ok, so she doesn't really peek, she kind of stands there, mascara wet in her hand, belly all in a froth, she watches the back with its inch by inch reveal, the long and graceful spine, the top of the ass, the firmly-muscled calves and the soft jut of one breast as Rebekah half-turns to give her a profile, dress in hand, and she remembers Klaus, just stepping out of the shower the other night right as she was coming in, towel not yet around his waist, hair in those wet little ringlets you could just throw your panties for, steam on his arms and down his stomach, and he's not bulky, there's no linebacker cast to his shoulders, he doesn't have the forearms of a fighter, but you can lick everything you see, she can assure you, and oh my God, his biceps are just the right size for wrapping your fingers around, and just holding the hell on, the way they flex when he thrusts, and all the little ripples of the triceps-

Right- naked Rebekah, crisis of sexuality, boobs, boobs, boobs, apparently she likes those now or something-

There's another shower running upstairs.

She wonders if that's Klaus.

Just standing under the spray for a while, that never goes away, he tells her, the long and sudsy satisfaction of a leisurely shower, she bets he's probably very naked,  _very_  naked, his hair in that kind of ridiculously adorable shampoo mohawk all boys do, she doesn't care if they are a bazillion and three, she knows he's got the little peak, he's perfecting the very tip of it, and smiling to himself in the glass of the shower door-

She saw him kill a man last night.

It was one of the other vampires, the guy screwed something up, she doesn't remember what now, but he just sighed, he stood in front of everyone lamenting how very hard it is to get good help nowadays, the way he will do, you know, kind of theatrical about it, hand on the guy's shoulder, he was so polite about it, but she could see it in his shoulders, the way they coiled just the teeniest bit, like he was about to spring, he cradled the guy's face almost tenderly in his hands, and he said it's all right, mate, shh, shh, don't flinch like that, it'll be all right, he could have been touching her, he traced the guy's cheek that softly with the tip of his thumb-

And then he ripped off his head.

And he smiled, and it went straight to her toes, and it lingered in all the parts of her no murder should stimulate.

She walked away.

Not because she wanted to.

You understand.

For so long she laid awake in some bed or another, in this house with its three trillion and one choices, and the heat lay on her heavy as a man, and she just-

She couldn't stop picturing the blood on his face, and the long slow lick with which he cleaned it.

And, God, the look he gave her from beneath his lashes afterward.

You couldn't-

You couldn't understand what it is to be a girl, to be  _just_  a girl, who likes her boys broad-shouldered, who maybe was up for a little light spanking and a blindfold, who watches this man, this little lithe man with the curls like an angel's, and the smile nearly as beatific, to watch this man- to watch him crush a man's skull as a child squishes his unwanted grape, and to feel your knees knock a little, your throat tighten, your panties slicken.

And then you look upon him prowling this line of frightened neighbors, who have commited no more crime than to stand beside this failure, and they tremble, you can smell every moist proof of their terror, the sweaty napes, the shining foreheads, and you think, God, he could slaughter them all.

He wouldn't even blink.

And it's hot in your belly, between your legs, you could watch him do this, you realize, and suck the blood from his lip, and fist the curls in your hand, and take him right there.

She sets down her mascara.

The shower upstairs has shut off, but she can hear someone moving about his room, and smell the fresh waft of his favorite soap.

She tiptoes out of the bathroom.

She won't surprise him, he'll hear her coming from three miles away, but she walks so lightly up the stairs anyway, she whisks to the doorway of his room like he doesn't know, he hasn't heard, he will turn around and find her standing there and for just a moment be stunned by this, the red dress, the lipstick like blood-

But he is.

She'll never fully comprehend it.

He will always be a little bit undone, he will always have to reorient himself, he's never going to look at her, and expect what it does to him.

He's wearing just his towel still, jeans in his hand.

"Good morning, love," he says softly.

And you can see him wondering if he should approach her, you can see he knows, she's reached another point, there is before her a fork in the road, she has to hesitate at the edge, because she's not yet sure, she's just so _young_ , she is not supposed to know a man is capable of everything, even when you love him.

She has to remember: morality's not colorless.

If a man cannot lie down an angel in his trenches and rise still a cherub, a monster cannot bed down in his years and wake still a boy.

But it's such a hard mirror to look at.

To watch him and see before her all these gazillion trillion years of her own ugly truth.

It's why sometimes-

Sometimes she still looks at him like she hates him.

She's never crushed someone like that before, with just a particular lift of her brow, and a dismissive cutting away of her eyes.

She's never had that much weight.

But it's like- he has to  _brace_ for her.

He shakes out his jeans a little nervously, she always wondered, how could little old her put so much care into his movements, how could he bear himself with that sudden self-consciousness of man just because she's watching, she finds him wanting, he can only strive and strive because she. Deserves. Better.

She wonders, how may paintings has he perused, how many treasuries has he cracked the seal upon, how many hallowed marble halls has he strolled like they're nothing-

And what stays him is not the statues of Vienna, or the lakes of Slovenia, he has touched a thousand fine satins, and crested the hills of a thousand great wars, and what makes him blink-

It's just a little blonde girl nobody ever wanted.

To think he's carried that within him all this way.

She watches him unbutton his jeans.

She's going to stand at this same fork a thousand times, a million times, she's going to have to weigh him, and think to herself, which can she live without, morality or man, of which is she more frightened, millenia in his bed or centuries on her cool and unbloodied sheets.

See, she wants to pretend she doesn't know the answer.

But there's going to come a step.

She's going to hook her fingers into the space between skin and towel, and for a moment just look up at him, and he's going to be so overcome, just by this, he's going to touch something on her, maybe a cheek, maybe a curl, and he's going to stroke it like his years are not infinite, he has just one small scrap of this world to tuck away and to take to his grave, and he wants it to be this.

And then they're just going to kind of fall into one another.

He'll hold himself up on her forehead, she'll curl her fingers into his necklaces.

And you're going to know, just by looking at them: in all their trillion years of dirty unlife with the mistakes piled like freaking Dominoes just awaiting the fall, they're always going to show up here, with just the one eensy step between them.

She holds the nape of his neck in her hand when she kisses him, so she can stroke the wet hair there, and he leans into her like if he doesn't he'll fall, both his wet arms going around her waist, and there's that inhale through his nose, the long shuddery one, she's never sure if he has quite enough breath for her, and then his tongue on her lip, and she opens her mouth, she presses her hips forward into him, he's already hard, she can feel him through his flimsy little towel-

He's so freaking talented with his tongue.

It's never an intrusion, he slips it in so smoothly, it makes her remember all the other places he can be just as deft with it-

She digs her nails into his shoulders.

God, the way his muscles shift underneath her fingers, when he puts her into the wall.

She grabs him by the throat, and holds him away from her.

His eyes are all hazy with his lust, he's got that little tinge of yellow to them, and the faint ink just starting along his cheekbones, and when she presses in with her thumbs so that his breathing goes all harsh, his eyes brighten, his cheeks darken, his towel goes a little more stressed in the general pants area.

"Get on the bed," she demands, and he smiles and tilts his head down so he can kiss the joint of her thumb where it lies pressed against his carotid, looking up at her from beneath his eyelashes.

And then he just stands there with that little wicked smile on his face, one of his hands trailing along her arm to the delicate bones of her wrists where he wraps his fingers, and pries her hand so easily off his neck.

She grabs him with her other hand and kisses him so roughly she tastes his blood.

"Get. On. The. Bed," she tells him slowly, in her voice that has mobilized years of cheerleaders, and brought to tears the studliest of footballers.

He tilts his head while he thinks about it, not even trying to dislodge her hand, just breathing evenly through all her strength, his veins just a little more visible.

So she takes a step forward, forcing him back, she walks him right into the edge of the bed with her hand around his throat, and lowers him slowly onto the sheets.

She reaches down and unknots his towel with her free hand, and feels up the crease of his hip with it, slowly, skimming just past where he really wants her to touch, and not looking away from his eyes so she can see that little flutter of his lids when she brings one knee up onto the bed beside his thigh, so she's half-straddling him now, her other foot still on the floor.

He watches her bring her other knee up.

She leans in and just takes a tiny nip of his bottom lip, with her human teeth this time, not sitting astride him but just hovering above, and pulling back to see how this affects him.

He's looking up from beneath those blonde-tipped lashes, his tongue coming out to wet his lips, he always does it so slowly, like he's got something to savor, it drives her so freaking  _nuts_ , so she leans in, she bites him a little harder this time, and he slides his hands up her thighs right underneath her dress, and pauses with his thumbs on her inner thighs.

"Why don't you take orders for once, love?" he asks, with that little smile that makes her so much more inclined to say yes.

"It's not really my thing," she replies coyly, and moves her hand up just a little so she's got this brutal clench around his jaw.

He unzips her dress and pushes the sleeves off either shoulder, very slowly, so they can both appreciate the gradual unveiling of her breasts; she didn't bother with a bra this morning, so when he peels the dress down to her waist, she's bare to the beginning flare of her hips.

He slides his hands back beneath her dress, and slips them all the way up to her ass.

"I think you'll enjoy these orders, sweetheart," he tells her, and smiles so that just a hint of the dimples show.

He kisses the sensitive skin on her stomach, just above her panty line, his lips are so warm, she thinks about what they'd feel like, just a little lower, and then he takes her hand from around his throat, and pushes her skirt up over her hips, bunching it there so she's only in her little black thong, the front of it already soaked.

He runs his tongue up her stomach to the underside of her breast, and she drops her head, she feels her toes curl, her spine arches, and then he pulls away, and his hand slides into his lap.

He wraps his long fingers around his dick, just keeping his thumb on the tip of it, and smoothing it around for a moment, very slowly, over the top, around the rim and then down the underside so lightly there's a little ripple in his shoulders, and a sudden clench of his thigh muscles, every little tendon standing out.

"Go on, love," he says in that little whisper of his.

But she's never done this with a guy before, she's never watched the big knowledgeable hand stroke away so confidently, squeezing just exactly right, and easing off as he approaches the tip, so that his toes are in this sort of permanent rictus with it.

He kisses her stomach again, just above her belly button, looking up at her from beneath his eyebrows, his hand still pumping away, and she hesitates for a moment, she lets self-consciousness stay her hand just a bit, and then she slips it inside her thong, wiith his lips still flush against her panty line.

He turns his face to the side so she can feel his bristly cheek against her belly, and runs his tongue just along her panty line, and she half-shuts her eyes and God she is so wet, she could lower herself just a little, and take the tip of him so easily, she could sink all the way, and sit there for a moment with her nipples grazing his slick chest, wait for him to grip her ass, and pull her hips forward in their first langorous surge, so that the friction rubs her clit just exactly right-

She touches herself a little carefully at first, she just sort of curls her fingers along either side of her clit until she can slip one inside, and it feels so good, to see the way his eyes flutter and his hand tightens on his dick- he leans his forehead against her belly, his mouth opens on this little involuntary breath, and she jerks her panties suddenly over her ass, and down to her knees.

He bites her right at the base of her belly.

It's so tender, his teeth just sink right in, and when he takes his first drink, his lips sealing around this new wound, it hits her, God,  _everywhere_ , she has to stop for just a moment and breathe, her free hand burying itself in his hair, and for a moment he looks up, his face completely inhuman, licking her blood from his lips, and she comes right then, clenching around her finger, and with her thumb stroking a frantic second pulse from her clit.

He stops stroking himself, his shoulders heaving, and she gasps out, "No, keep going," and jerks his head back by the nape hair so she can taste her blood from his lips.

He's breathing so hard his kisses are a little less smooth, he's too swept up in it now to be all polished, he kisses her chin and has to pause for a gasp against her throat, and she likes that, she likes the warm little flutter of his breath, and how his hand shines in the light, all slick with his sweat and his precum, he's so close, and she thinks with this little flare deep down in her belly she's never actually seen a guy come before.

She wants to see the exact arch of his throat, and the spill of it down his hand.

His jaw tightens when it happens, all the muscles in his forearm stand out, she hears his toes crack, feels the spurt of him on her thigh, he's breathing so shakily against her throat where he has buried his face, his lips smearing blood across her neck, and she thinks oh God, what it's going to feel like, to lower herself onto all that slick warmth, and feel him already sticky on her clit when she comes again.

It's all he can do to just grip her ass and breathe when she sits astride him, positioning herself so that he slips inside her, just the tip at first, so that she can rock forward and kiss him, their foreheads sticky against one another.

"Just right there," she gasps when he thrusts against her G spot. "Oh my God,  _yes_ , Klaus, oh God-"

He bites her nipple, and she feels a warning clench, and a gush of warmth down over him, it's not hard enough to draw blood, but oh, she just arches into that, she tips her head back so there are no curls in the way, just her hard nipples and his warm mouth smearing blood over her chest, up to her collar bone, and now he lifts her by the ass off him, so she can feel the wet glide of him along her clit as he pulls out, and he's so slick, he's so warm, he runs the tip of him along her clit and bites her nipple again, a little harder this time, another surge of the tip of him along her clit, she feels a little beginning pulse, she gasps his name into his neck, and mouths along the hot skin there until she finds the spot that makes him moan, and then she presses her own teeth in.

He says something that might be her name, she can't quite make it out, and then he lifts his hips to slip just the tip of him inside her, and begins to thrust shallowly so he's sliding right against her clit with each slow surge of his hips and he tastes so  _good_ , his skin still has that faint layer of shower soap, his blood is thick against her tongue, she can follow the droplets with her tongue down to the hollow of his throat, and lick the phereomone sweat from its base.

She lifts her head to kiss him, just softly at first, but he's so frantic, he holds her face in both his hands and kisses them both ragged, he's making all these little noises against her mouth, and when she raises her hand to touch his cheek, to feel along his beard and back into his curls he turns his face to kiss her palm, he presses his lips against it for so long and then nestles his cheek against it, he tries to say her name, chokes it off in her shoulder, brings both his arms around her back to press her flush against him when she gasps out a breathless "Oh  _shit_ , Klaus-" as the first ripple of her orgasm hits her.

He cradles the back of her head in his hand when she comes, and kisses along her cheek to her temple, up to her forehead, down her nose, he angles himself just a little differently, and jerks his hips up so fast, so hard, and she wheezes against his shoulder and bites the scream back down into her throat when there is a clench inside her so hard she can only grip him by the shoulders, and lay her cheek against her shoulder to shudder her way through it.

He's pulled out almost all the way for his next thrust when he comes, so that she can feel the spurt of it along her thigh, and then he flips them suddenly, so that she's on her back among the sheets, and he braces himself on his forearms and starts to just slam into her, her hips ache with it, she claws up the sheets and hooks her ankles at his waist and he's still coming, he is still shivering and gasping his way through his orgasm, his slick belly going so hard against hers when she realizes she's on the freaking edge freaking  _again_ , and she sighs out, "Klaus- Klaus, oh my God, I'm going to come again-"

-and suddenly he's gone, and she feels his tongue slip past her clit, right into her, and that does it, she arches her back, she grabs him roughly by the hair, all the tingly heat of this sweeps all the way down to her toes-

He pulls her legs a little wider with his hands, and thrusts back into her, keeping his hands on her knees and taking her kneeling, so that she can see the crease of his hips and how they ripple when he pushes forward, how the sweat runs down the line of that prominent bone and right down his thigh, and oh God, oh God God  _God_  she's still coming, her toes curl to the breaking point, her spine cracks, she feels that swelling ache in her clit, she slips her hand down to thumb it, he thrusts three more times, and now she feels another warm gush, his whole face clenches, his mouth drops open, his eyes roll back-

It is a very long time before her toes uncurl and her backs relaxes down into the sheets.

Ok, soooo...maybe not such a big lezzy lesbian after all.

* * *

But there are the other dreams.

She never really appreciated how smooth a girl's skin could be, that's what she notices. The way it slides across your own, and how sleek her hair, how fresh her neck.

It's so much more supple than a boy's, a girl's neck.

She never noticed that before.

* * *

The little twit is still hung up on Nik.

Oh, she wakes up with her sheets all in a twist, and her little black panties similarly knotted, and the sweat down her back and between her breasts, and maybe for a moment she yearns after a pair of sweet white breasts.

But if Nik has fallen first, and hardest, Caroline lingers not far behind him.

It strikes her one night in the library, while she is pretending to browse the shelves, and Nik is quizzing Caroline on her Greek.

It's nothing overt.

Caroline is perched in the great red arm chair Kol used to sneak his books in, so that they may all shield their eyes, and pretend he is only the jester with which every royalty must decorate its halls.

Nik is sitting on the arm.

They're arguing, but there's a smile in Nik's voice.

And Caroline looks up with one in her eyes.

And it strikes her:

She's never been loved.

Perhaps there was a count who brought her watered yellow silk and a king whose wife kneeled before the axeman that she might take her rightful seat beside his hand, but she's never been loved.

She leaves the room.

She sits on the stairs and cries till Elijah emerges from his study.

But oh, Lijah.

You can't touch it.

She never needed a man.

Just a friend who would lie still beside her, if her lips were to purse, her breasts to sag.

When Nik looks at Caroline, you can see: if he rolled over one morning to find some haggard pile of bones and mummy dust, notched with all her thousand, thousand lives, he'd catch his breath a little, and for a moment simply lie blinking before her beauty.

* * *

She doesn't know why she does it.

But one night she is mid-dream, Caroline's top half over her head, when she stops.

She opens her eyes.

Above her, beside Nik, her head perhaps pillowed on his shoulder, his lips perhaps resting on her hair, Caroline does not wake.

She watched them sleep once.

Nik was lying carefully beside her, just enough distance between them, you can tell, Father dead, all the world a slave, Caroline Forbes is the only thing left that scares him, but Caroline has no such qualms, and she rolled herself against his chest, she pressed her face into it with a sigh, and he woke.

Just for a moment.

You could laugh at the git, a thousand years invincible, and so terrified.

But she didn't.

She watched him handle Caroline's hair like some bloody precious Monet or another, and fall asleep with his hand tangled in it.

So she remembers this, and she stops the dream.

She gets out of bed.

She leaves her most flattering Chanel Rouge Allure on the nightstand beside Caroline.

For a moment, she strokes the girl's hair, so softly she'll never know.

And then she steps foot outside the front door, into the moonless night, with the sound of men dying somewhere far away down by the river, and the scent of their blood fresh in her nose, and she does not go back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more part to this, which will be uploaded whenever the hell I have time to write it, and then it's on to the 12th entry in the series. We creep ever and ever closer to the end, my friends.
> 
> In the next part: ENZO.
> 
> Also a flashback featuring human Klaus.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: So obviously we've still got loads to deal with, Klebekah tension, the continual chaos that is New Orleans as the violence just escalates and escalates, etc. etc., but I wanted to make this first part all about Caroline, and actually give her some space to grow as she wasn't allowed to do on the show when Liz died. I think Liz's death should be a pivotal moment for Caroline as a character, and TVD just used it to push Steroline. I don't want this plotline to be about a ship, any ship, I want it to be about Caroline.
> 
> And: 'The first thing to remember with murder is to have fun and be yourself'- I think this is an actual quote from something, but I'm not sure of the origin; it was a line I say on a Kol gifset on tumblr, actually.
> 
> Also, I want to make a quick note on the whole Stefan thing. I don't know if anyone's been wondering where he is, but obviously he's been pretty non-existent throughout the last couple of one-shots. I'm going to just write him out of the series. And I hate to do this, because I had a lot more planned for him, and I really just hate to unceremoniously boot him out the door, but TVD has finally managed to do something that both it and TO have so far utterly failed in, and that's to so annihilate my enthusiasm for something that I just don't want to deal with it. I don't know why Stefan is the sole victim here; I hate what they've done with all the characters, Klaus most of all, and obviously the craptacular writing has only fueled my muse. I think maybe it's just that he's been so shoehorned into Caroline's story on TVD that now I don't want him anywhere near it.
> 
> I was really hoping to work past this feeling, but I just can't, and the thing is, this series is supposed to be my escape from the shittiness that is TO and TVD. So if something leaves a bad taste in my mouth, the way Stefan and the Steroline friendship in particular now does, I'm not going to force myself through it. I started this series so I could explore these characters in a way that I actually enjoyed, and in a way that hopefully readers disillusioned with the spinoff could enjoy, and that's just what it comes down to, at the end of the day. So Stefan will get a very quiet, blink-and-you-miss-it send-off, and I'm sorry if that disappoints anyone, but I just can't deal with his fuckface in Caroline's life after what the writers have done with their relationship.


End file.
